Ivan's Passage

Having the password to Boudica's blog is better than having the keys to her car. I thought I'd take it for a spin.

When you live in paradise, you have to pay the rent when it comes due, just like everyone else. This year the cost of living in the Florida Panhandle was a little higher than anticipated. It cost some folks their entire homes and all their belongings. We were fortunate: a couple dozen trees, a few shingles, and minor miscellaneous damage that can all be repaired. But this area, overall, looks worse than some bombed out areas that I’ve seen. The residents are slowly, like ants, cleaning up the detritus that was left in Ivan’s wake. In several years, aside form the drastic change in landscaping, a visitor won’t be able to tell that a hurricane had affected us so deeply.

Two days after Ivan’s destructive passage, I was standing on my porch looking at the downed trees and broken fences, trying to decide what I’d start on that morning. I noticed my bird feeder, which I had rehung the day before, was being used continuously by black capped chickadees, tufted titmice, finches, cardinals etc. in numbers I’d never seen before. The humming bird feeder was surrounded by so many hummers that they looked like bees flitting around. Through the trees into my neighbor’s back yard two houses over, I could see a little girl on her swing, pumping with all her might, going almost horizontal from the ground, enjoying a cool September morning in the South. I knew then that everything was really back to normal for most of us, at least those who still had a home that was livable. Only our landscape had actually changed.

We all knew the rent would come due some year, but damn, we didn’t know it would be that high.

TGOO