I have no words

...to describe how NOT Normal life is these days.
Everything familiar about my routine is scrambled about.

We were lucky in that we didn't lose our home or family; but the mental strain has been so tough for everyone in the area.

The streets, once clogged with storm debris, are now clogged with traffic from "Away," that is, out-of-town contractors. I'm living in a Federal Disaster Area. The trees think it is Spring- all their leaves were ripped away from the fierce winds; they have begun to blossom and leaf out to regain some energy savings for winter.

The Cardigan was put away for a long time. I may pick it up again and finish it in time for my Father's birthday. But what use is a Cardigan in the sizzling heat and humidity of a post-hurricane landscape?

It's the promise of winter here that keeps us - at least keeps me- going.
Winter, when the temperatures drop into the 50s, the grass is _supposed_ to be brown and dead, instead of the strange out-of-time deadness it has now from being trapped two months under tons of downed trees and power line poles and sopping wet carpet and refrigerators and wet drywall and the destroyed pictures and clothes and high school yearbooks and wedding scrapbooks and library books and sheet metal and dead fish from the bayous and dead animals from the toxic sludge pumped out of the streets of New Orleans.

I'm weeping now- not just for the stupid, senseless loss. I weep because it is not something I can turn away from. It is all around me and I can't get away from it. Even when you clean up your little homestead, you turn a corner or run into someone and the whole thing knocks you down again.
Nature doesn't give you a time-out here.