Howloween Sandy

We interrupt our regularly scheduled family history installment for a breaking story on Hurricane Sandy. I’m in a high school gym, that I’ve only been to previously for work. Now I’m on a cot. I’m told our apartment is dry, though it’s inaccessible until the lake that was the street returns to an inroad instead of a river. Everyone on the other side is stranded, unless they have an emergency, where police and the fire department have been getting some across in boats. I went back twice, with the only result being my taking five people, two dogs and one rabbit, who had spent the night in a dark, cold, wet terror to the evacuation center I’d come from and friends’ houses.

Some lost everything. There are no stores or outlets to travel out from the other side. Those who remain are on higher ground that we hope have stocked up for the duration. They have electricity, with most of their cars and homes intact. Some were not so lucky; some were rescued from roofs or upper floors in wet clothes. They were where the streets were lower. Was on the phone with my child who had called for an update at the same time I had walked a couple of blocks later in the day to see if either the water had gone down or if I could get across. The answer was priority boat assisted evacuation only.

It was understandable. If I were to be taken across, this wasn’t a 24/7 water taxi service. Work was to be attended the next day. I would have likely ended up stranded come the next morning, unable to leave, our car that survived the storm as I’d heeded the evacuation warning parked on the side of civilization. Close, yet not an option to swim to if the water had not gone down much or the emergency crews were not available.

Scores of years since the last flood of this magnitude, in this part of the country, maybe even a century. The trauma hasn’t hit me yet, though we were among the lucky. For what it kicks up regarding past experiences brings everything back. Including the residual trauma. Had we been able to leave, closer to family when the time was appropriate, we would not be here at all. The hurricane didn’t go there.

With one exception, another single mom with a daughter my child's age who happens to be an accountant, I didn't know the names of any of them. When the dogs' names were spoken, being at each other in a small car, the names left my memory as soon as they were uttered. We were and are all still recovering from a temporary displacement with deep emotional reverberations. I empathized with the thirst of days without food or water, still not knowing for certain what I would be going back to myself.

Everything that day was on a moment to moment basis, and is somewhat the same today, Halloween: another anniversary when my first and only child's conception was announced six weeks into the first trimester. Every day was almost dreamily surreal then: the shock of carrying a child after I'd given up it was even possible. Now that child is reportedly carrying a pillowcase to collect candy he'll likely give away or will not be consumed; it's all just too much, as are the secrets for now, though the desire to participate overshadows any trepidation.

The mall is filled with costumed children that are hard to look at for the memories that are stirred: the innocent face looking up in anticipation for the plastic pumpkin to be filled, store to store in the old neighborhood, brimming over before the children's parade began. The candy that would never be finished, again, in a way just as well, though the feelings that have accompanied since have been so unnecessary.

The lightness of childhood became heavier, a grain of sand at a time, until they became virtual sandbags to a young psyche. Life is now emptying the sandbox, a scoop at a time (sometimes a pinch, sometimes a teaspoon), so that not fully grown toes can dig themselves in, and remember all the happy thoughts, without guilt that was never theirs from when it began, imposed and accepted, as children do.

Here's to no longer longingly gazing at an animal wished to be their own, for it will be, and the sandbox, and the complimenting Howloween costume, the pair will be the toast of their own parade, with more smiles returning. Sandy the hurricane is just a bump in the road by comparison. The storm in this life so far is the interim between one anniversary and the one that makes up for all of the others, during a childhood.