Sixteen years ago today, I was sitting on the couch in a stranger's living room in Auburn, AL watching Hurricane Katrina make landfall. Auburn was our second stop; we initially evacuated to Birmingham, but knew we wouldn't be able to afford to stay in a hotel for long. My friend had friends in Auburn. They were cool with the cat (my cat Pumpkin), and said we could stay as long as we needed. We stayed a few days before moving onto Georgia (Rome, where my friend's sister lived), and then to my parents' house in Virginia. I stayed with my parents for four months, basically the university recruiting season (I was an admissions counselor at the time), before I moved back home to New Orleans. I stayed in New Orleans nine months before moving back to Virginia. I regretted moving away, but I also know it was the right thing to do at the time.
This is the time that's most frustrating and scary during a hurricane - the time when you don't know what's going to happen and there's not much else you can do. If you evacuated, you wait. If you didn't evacuate, you wait, probably without power. And then you wait some more. And then it happens; sometimes very slowly, with the storm dragging itself across land. Other times, it's quick, moving on to the next place it wants to terrorize. But it's the waiting that becomes so very stressful. In Auburn, I baked cookies and did laundry for people I didn't know. My friend mowed their lawn and cleaned. We went to a movie. I have no idea what movie, but it was something to do while we waited. And then it happened, and we knew we wouldn't be going home for a long time. So we started planning what to do next. And we drove on. I got pulled over for speeding in Tennessee, but the cop didn't give me a ticket because of where I was from. I had to buy new suits so I could go on the road and try to convince teenagers and their parents they should come to "hurricane college." I did my best not to punch a 17 year old in the face for telling me everyone in my city was dead; he's lucky I was too tired to punch him. I smiled a hard smile when parents referred to my university as "Scuba U." People suck.
So today, I wait again. It's a different kind of waiting; I wonder if this is how my parents felt as they waited for me to come home. I wait to hear from people who stayed and those who evacuated. I wait to see what will happen. I wait.
I started embroidering when I returned to New Orleans after the hurricane. I needed something to do in the evenings. There weren't many places to go and there was a curfew and most of my friends hadn't come back. Nothing felt the same in those first few months, so I stayed home and taught myself how to embroider. I learned three stitches: back stitch, split stitch, and stem stitch. That's all I've got for today.
Details:
Stitches: back, split, and stem stitches
Thread palette: SS 804 (3, 6 strands), 404, 280, 504, 011 (3 strands), 303 (6 strands)
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