One storm, two Irmas, and a whole lot to think about
I’d like to thank Irma. Actually, I’d like to thank two Irmas. One is the young hotel clerk I rang up in Tampa about a million years ago, back when we thought Irma the hurricane was headed to our Delray Beach home on Florida’s east coast.
Irma the front desk clerk sounded young, sweet, and compassionate. And very competent. Nothing rattled her, not the incessant ringing of phones or the press of would-be guests at the counter or the furiously televised big red blob hovering over the entire penninsula.
At first I thought I had misunderstood. We were deep into hurricane prep. My brain was addled. Had she really said “This is Irma” when she picked up the phone?
No, I decided. She must have said, “This is La Quinta. Be safe in Irma.”
That was much more likely. In any case, the woman who was not Irma and a coworker found us rooms and promised the pet-friendly hotel would take our yellow lab and one-eyed Persian. Good news.
Then the storm shifted west. La Quinta country. Tampa was out. When I called to give up the room, the same unflappable desk clerk answered, and I was able to clarify the matter of her name.
Yes, it really is Irma. Yes, people were making a lot of corny jokes. No, she didn’t mind. And, no, she would not be charging me a cancellation fee. It doesn’t get any better than that, at least not in a Cat 5 or even Cat 4 storm, and who cares if it’s going to be downgraded later. So, thank you, Irma, for everything. The second Irma I need to thank is the one who made me reflect upon my life as the storm approached. I hate her for what she did. To the islands. To the Keys. To the people who feared her and fled her. To those who lost their homes, their loved ones, their lives. But I do appreciate the fact that she made me pause. Because after you batten down the house, haul in the porch swing, and create a snack counter for 42 bags of Honey BBQ beef jerky, what do you do? You take stock.
The first thing I did after the obvious basics were covered (mostly by my husband, Pete Cross, who’s a Cat 5 when it comes to preparation) was sift through boxes of family photographs.
Pete is a photographer, so while many families might have a reasonably sane number of photos to sort, we have, conservatively speaking, three or four thousand.
One of the first “finds” I came across was of two impish-looking kids posing like tough guys on a neighbor’s motorcycle. One of the kids had captioned the shot “Peace Bunnies” and “Cruisen.” It was cute, so I did the logical thing and took time out from preparing for a major natural disaster to post to Facebook.
Our older daughter, Chloe, Tough Guy #1 in the driver’s seat, responded right away. “This is good. But get out of there!!” She is 24. Clearly role reversal had set in. She was no longer a peace bunny. She was my substitute mother. (My real mom tends toward hyper-agitation, so we had placed her on a strict news diet as she monitored the red blob from her perch in Vermont.)
Pete and I were still trying to figure out when and where and whether to evacuate, so I went out to ride my bike. Great stress reducer. I took my sweet time and then pumped hard around the bend, where a row of black mailboxes were flapping with their mouths open.
I peeked inside one and saw … nothing. Suddenly, I felt a great debt to the U.S. Postal Service. In the past few days, I had written and received several meaningful notes, and I vowed to continue the practice post Irma. Who needs email?
Just in case, I checked mine when I got home, and what do you know. Our younger daughter’s DNA results were in! I had just sorted through the box of her adoption documents and placed the important ones in the safe. Now we had information that she was not only Cambodian but also Polynesian.
Chanthy and I traded a flurry of prestorm phone calls to discuss this exciting bit of ancestral news, and I confess the four-alarm mother part of me thought, Thank goodness we have a chance to talk about this before Irma knocks me out.
I was on a roll. We still had a few days before Irma was scheduled to hit as a Cat 4 or Cat 5. Good time to fiddle with my phone and scan some documents. Such a scan is mental as well as physical.
I came across my grandparents’ yellowed burial instructions and was gratified to see we had followed them to a tee. Then I found the jewelry Grandma had collected when she lived in Mexico. It isn’t super expensive and there isn’t very much of it, but it’s hers, and when I looked closely, I noticed that … it needed polishing. Somehow I found the silver-cleaning rag. Then I found the thoughtful letters my father had written to our girls detailing a part of their family history.
Now it was Friday. Two days left. I went through old job files, letters, and journals. The good and the bad. Did I really need all this stuff? I decided to scan the good stuff, the things I wanted to remember. And here’s the beautiful part. I threw out everything else.
On Saturday, chain saws chewed the trees. Final preparations. Pete came through the Florida room hauling a 200-pound board for the front door. I looked up at him and remembered it was our 28th wedding anniversary.
“Should I drown the old tax returns in the bathtub?” I asked. Sure, he said. So that’s another six feet of paperwork out of our lives for good. I was feeling liberated.
In another box, I uncovered photos from 2000 and 2001. The first packet showed a four-year-old Chanthy posing in front of the magnificent ancient temples of her Cambodian homeland. Next up was a picture of both girls taken by my parents in New York City. The time stamp said August 2001, and the Twin Towers stood proudly in the background. Indelible moments and monuments all wrapped together, in my mind and now in bubblewrap.
I put the photos in our emergency “to go” box, a huge plastic container of the sort you might find at a Tupperware party for giants. Then I speculated as to whether the box would fit on our paddle board. If it came to that. Then she hit. It was not that bad, really. Nothing like other places. The Keys. The islands. The nursing home in Hollywood where eight people lost their lives in unbearable heat after the air-conditioning failed. We are only now beginning to learn the breadth and depth of what Irma did to us.
Here? In Delray Beach? We lost power, our favorite orchid tree, a few roof tiles. But we did not lose anything important. And believe me, we know it.
“It’s really a chance to review your whole life,” a friend said when we met a few days later at a restaurant to hit pause on the replay.
A few places had opened and were filled with people doing exactly the same thing: reflecting on their lives, making adjustments, tallying up the good and the bad and the yet-to-do. We felt pensive and giddy. We began making plans. Maybe this year we will do a few things better, be a bit kinder, more aware … or bold … or committed … or diligent. Or, whatever.
Or maybe not. But housecleaning is not just a physical act.
For that, I thank Irma the Hurricane.
Christine Evans lives, writes and teaches in Palm Beach County.