Well, it's been almost three weeks since I have been online, we took the Fema check and got a notebook,(and a lot of stuff at Target)because we would be well on our way to losing our livelihood, financial info, and any communication with the outside world.
We lost our home, our neighborhood, our town, every beautiful and ugly thing along the coast has been shredded to bits, and I have become breathless in a frenzy of surviving day to day.
The terror rose in the moments between waiting to hear about the storm, and waiting to hear of survivors, then the silence, when there was no news of the little town on the Peninsula. My husband was one of the first on the scene, making it in the next day.
My first few days were spent at a resort in upstate Mississippi. The playground for the wealthy slowly became a place of refuge, then soon a shelter was opened on the premises.
My time at the hotel ran out, it was booked, and there were no other hotels to take my family, I have four kids, and my sick mother South of Jackson needed supplies. For a week we lived in what I thought could be hell on earth, washing clothes in a bucket with whatever water I could get. The ice we did get we had to drive miles for on scanty gas rations. Twenty dollars of gas if you sit in line for three hours. Where I was wrong in those early days, was that hell was only beginning, I set for my hometown on the Coast, Bay Saint Louis, and the world crumbled into a kaliedescope of disturbing images, desperation, six hour lines for relief services, abundant MRE's, and the oppressive heat that challenges the stongest willed to keep on keeping on.
There is no excuse for the hell that people have had to suffer through these last 18 days. If there are final days about us, it is the Gulf Coast that has seen the first of the last.
I have seen and heard enough these to fill reems of paper, for now, I just want you all to know I am alive, my family is okay, and we are now part of the Coastal Diaspora, removed to Pensacola for now.