A comment made to one of my recent Facebook posts had me realizing that unless you lived through Hurricane Harvey and are STILL dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, you might have no idea what’s going on down here post-Hurricane Harvey.
For example: In our ten-house circle, we are still the ONLY people in residence. Next-door neighbors are renting a condo. Neighbors to their right are staying in Lake Charles, Louisiana with family.
Neighbors to their right… we talk to them off and on but don’t know where they’re staying. Neighbors to their right are renting a house in a neighboring subdivision so their teens can stay in the same school.
Husband has talked to the dude to our left (on the other side of the main street) and he’s close. But that’s all we know. Then there is us.
Us is now four adults: self, husband, daughter, son-in-law. They were also displaced by the flooding but it kinda worked out since the hubs and the son-in-law are tackling the rebuilding.
The four of us live on the second floor of our home along with our two dogs and their two dogs, our five cats and their four cats. Oh, and now we’re fostering a dumped stray who just had surgery.
We turned the hubs office into our bedroom. My office is now OUR office AND the living / TV / public room with the sofa that was already up here. We lost our good living room furniture downstairs.
My daughter and son-in-law occupy one of the spare bedrooms, and the final spare bedroom serves as our kitchen and pantry. We have two folding tables and three patio chairs downstairs. Those are usually covered in tools and construction detritus, so we eat in the office.
And, yes. We cook. Enchiladas. Sausage or salmon on the grill. We do buy a lot of rotiesserie chickens but now that we’re settled into what will be a routine lasting several months, we’re doing our best not to eat fast food… though we do order pizza every couple of weeks!
We have a mini fridge and a dorm fridge, a crock pot, a toaster, a can opener, and coffeemaker upstairs. I managed to save my Kitchenaid stand mixer but those are our only small appliances. Downstairs in the construction zone is our wall-mounted microwave and toaster oven.
Since we lost most of our clothes, hubs and I are sharing his office closet. Only a half dozen garments are hanging. The rest are folded and stacked on shelves since we lost our dressers. Somewhere in the garage is a bag of clothes to go to the dry cleaner, but none of those items are daily wear so can wait.
We’re sleeping on a donated mattress and box springs set that is heaven. My wonderful daughter-in-law obtained the bed for us. My daughter and son-in-law have a mattress on the floor. Their clothes are on a bookshelf.
We have three big shelving units in the kitchen-pantry bedroom for the food and the dishes. We use a lot of disposables but wash some upstairs and some down. My knees complain a lot but the hot tub is working once again!
But you know what? We’re doing fine. It’s just a new life that we never expected to be living. I’m so very happy to be in our home with what we have left of our things. And only once in a while do we miss something we’ve lost, but we move on.
We’re sawing and hammering and painting and writing words. We’re building something new. I like it!