Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Hurricanes and heartache: Memories of Betsy

This week has brought back memories of when I was 9 years old and living in New Orleans when Hurricane Betsy stormed in, 40 years ago next month.

Our family left our mobile home and stayed the night on the second floor of apartments where my folks had lived previously. As everyone says, you never forget that roar of wind - especially in the dark, especially as a child.

Our station wagon was totaled, but miraculously, our mobile home floated during the storm, coming down almost on its blocks. The following year, in Cocoa, Fla., my stepmom was actually IN the same trailer (let's be honest -a 60-by-10 foot mobile home IS a trailer) when tornadoes tore through C. Florida and blew up trailers to either side of ours (unoccupied, with windows closed - the big air-pressure difference sealed their doom.)

Anyway, my heartfelt prayers for better times goes out to all hit hard by this tragedy. As a "Betsy veteran," I'm not thinking of the other impacts right now (high gas prices for example), but all the poor (literally in most cases) people left with so little. God tests us all in varied ways, but ... some worse than others;-/

1 comment:

Rhys said...

Yikes, glad you were okay! We just moved here from FL,, which had a horrible hurricane season last year. Don't miss them at all!