Existential Anxiety and Hurricanes

While I am not in the path of Hurricane Ida, I can't stop monitoring the weather blogs.  Often I do that just in case the hurricane does something unexpected, but it doesn't look like there's any possibility of weird jags with this storm.  Oh, storms with a name that starts with I, how I dread you!  I'm thinking of Hurricane Irma which ruined so much in my own life, Hurricane Irene which my parents experienced in Williamsburg and has left my dad forever spooked about the power of hurricanes, and then there was Ike before that, and Isabel.  Ida is expected to be a category 4, and it's going to strike on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, another storm that ruined so much in my life.

Of course, when I talk about ruin, it's material stuff, and if I made a list of the stuff, most people would shrug.  The furniture was old when it was damaged, and not the antique old, but the tired, tattered kind of old.  Both houses sustained damage, but they were repairable damages.  But oh, how long those repairs took.

I am not one of those coastal folks who just shrugs off a storm.  I'm not someone who can live in a damaged house while repairs are being done without reflecting on how everything that seemed solid really isn't.  It's even harder to live with the knowledge of the precipice we all teeter on with the early stages of climate change pounding us.  I want to head for higher ground, and I don't really mean the condo we live in now.  I want to run for the hills.

Of course, I have friends in the Asheville region who in some years have had worse hurricane seasons than I have.  I know that I've said it before, but it's worth repeating.  Still, my Asheville friends have only had 1 bad hurricane season, and it's not something they need to fear for six months out of every year.  It's a freak event, not a regular one, at least not yet.  

I think about those people in the path of Ida, people who still haven't recovered from last year's Hurricane Laura.  And that's what haunts me most, the knowledge that a coastal region can be hammered again and again and again.

It was Hurricane Irma that made me realize in a deeper-than-intellectual way that we couldn't stay in the house into retirement.  The seeds of our move to this condo were planted then.  My spouse might disagree.  He might say the seeds were planted with this blazing hot housing market that makes him hope we can make more by selling the house than he ever thought possible.  But for me, it's the deep desire to run for the hills.  This condo is our compromise.

At some point I'll write more about these early weeks in the condo.  Right now, they are marked by a different kind of existential anxiety, the need to sell the house we left behind.  This morning I will go for my walk, and then my plan is to head over and spend a few hours cleaning.  The painting of the exterior is still happening, which is fine, since we couldn't have gotten the house ready for an open house this week-end.  Hopefully we will have an open house on Sept. 12 and move quickly to a sale.

For this morning, let me work off all my existential anxieties through movement and sweat.