Our hurricane, its riches
Too late to warn about the flood plain being a broken
parasol; too late
for NOAA to decide Hurricane Floyd was the bully it proved
to be.
Or was. Or the bullies it and the Pamlico River
were. Pamlico painted thousands of homes with Pamlico mud;
made rummage haphazardly of living rooms and kitchens,
sailboats
of albums, their photos and recipes.
Uncounted were cherished dolls who drowned that 16th
of September, 1999.
Pamlico toyed with many others; it rode strollers on its
waves.
My daughters saw the parade of flotsam on the 17th.
That day
there were blue skies and a slightly retreating river; Floyd
wasn’t torrential
that day; he used broken trees as pointers to confirm it
wasn’t him.
It was the duplicitous Pamlico sky, its gray rage. Now
it was bright blue. Along swollen banks, I imagined sad
trombones trying
to rise from buried streets. I felt like I was in New
Orleans, dazed on Sunday morning.
But it wasn’t Sunday.
But it wasn’t Sunday.
It was three days before my children would open their Weekly
Readers to see
Greenville. Before and after. It was fifteen minutes before
their favorite Barbies
they’d put on Salvation Army tables would find new homes.
Actually, they’d find new arms and new hearts and their
almost new cot
at the East Carolina gymnasium, a new home if you could call
it that. Outside
the donation area, my girls watched to see if their dolls
were chosen.
And they were. Two little girls had hugged them, still were
when we saw them
walk away only with those dolls and nothing else. Floyd may
have taken theirs,
and more, like a thief of whiskers and licks, purrs and hugs
but he missed these blue skies and my daughters’ vaults, filled
with tears.
B.Koplen
8/26/12
No comments:
Post a Comment