Hurricane Irma Anniversary

On this day in 2017, we'd have been putting our most valuable possessions in the cars and driving further inland to get away from Hurricane Irma.  It was actually not the most panicked I felt in the lead up to that storm.  That moment came a day or two earlier, when it looked like South Florida might get a direct hit from Irma as a category 4 storm.

The folks in the Keys got to experience Irma as a category 4 storm.  We still had plenty of damage, and in some ways, we never recovered.  Sure, we fixed the damage.  But before Irma, we never fully realized how vulnerable that house was to flooding, and how much more likely we would be having flooding as the sea levels rose.

We could argue that it all turned out O.K.  We sold that house in the height of the South Florida real estate boom, and we sold it just in time.  We closed the deal in January of 2022; we wouldn't be so lucky now.  It took longer to move from contract to closing than we were expecting.  Several offers were rescinded when potential buyers discovered how much flood insurance would cost.

I am relieved to be someplace safer.  Even the experience of Hurricane Helene has not changed my mind, although I do see the irony that we left South Florida, which hasn't had much hurricane damage since Hurricane Irma, and got here in time for the worst natural disaster in North Carolina history.  But my hope here is that we've experienced a once in a hundred year storm, even factoring in climate change.  And we had no damage, so we fared better than many.

In some ways, I feel extraordinarily lucky.  I now have a dream job at Spartanburg Methodist College.  Once again, I thought of how much the world has changed since I last taught some of the literature I'm covering this fall.  Yesterday I taught the poetry of Keats, which I haven't taught since the early years of this century.  Back then, I had to do a bit of explaining about how much more communicable respiratory diseases can be than say, bloodborne diseases like AIDS.  Yesterday, as I was explaining tuberculosis, I thought about the fact that we've now had a global pandemic that my students have experienced personally, although I think tuberculosis is more ghastly than Covid 19, at least now.  We have a vaccine to protect us against Covid 19, although who knows how long those will continue to be available under the current regime.

I am in a place now that I couldn't have seen a way to get to back in 2017, when I was assessing possessions and getting ready for a hurricane.  I have a full-time teaching job at a small, liberal arts college.  I am still writing, and just yesterday, got an acceptance (more on that when the short story appears in South 85 Journal).  I live in a part of North Carolina where the cost of living is MUCH cheaper than in South Florida.  Although housing seems to be similarly expensive everywhere, our insurance and taxes are much cheaper here.

I do realize how lucky we are--not a day goes by when I am not grateful.