Source: Melanie Dione / Melanie Dione
Aug. 26, 2005, gave me everything that a Friday night could give.
My girls and I fell into a poetry night at a dark, sexy club, as girls our age did in a post- Love Jones society. Joy dominated the room. This is not my mind playing a trick, as I remember the before times. The room was energized by the call-and-response and lingering hugs that felt like home and community.
Peaches was still alive. She told me it was time to stop playing scared and write for more than just me. I hugged her. Neither of us knew it was for the last time. We hopped to another club. I was wining on a very fine man who my friends said looked like “your kind of foolishness.”
It was the type of night that made me feel like opting out of my relocation plan to D.C. the month before was the right choice. There isn’t a thing I would have changed about that night. It just would have been nice to know that New Orleans had just served me a last meal of sorts.
I woke up with a hangover and two missed calls from my daddy, asking what my hurricane plan was, because this storm was really coming. I half listened to a news report about a storm, but in my 28 years, that promise had yet to materialize. Remembering the huge and embarrassing argument we got into while we evacuated during Hurricane Ivan in 2004 — a stressful round trip that I couldn’t afford with a 4- and a 6-year-old — I revealed that my plan for the storm was no plan at all. “Baby, I’ll give you whatever you need. Grab what you can because we’re leaving tonight. We don’t want to be on these roads tomorrow.” Not tomorrow. Tonight. They always spoke with urgency about hurricanes. Daddy did not.
I scraped my coins together and filled up “Big Pimpin’,” my 1991 Celica with 228,000 miles and a winky headlight named after the first song that played on the radio when I bought it. Again, remembering how I overdid it for Hurricane Ivan, I grabbed only a weekend’s worth of clothes and our vital documents. At the last minute, I put the kids’ toys in a sealed Rubbermaid container and told them, “This way, if water gets in the house, your toys will still be dry.”
Source: Healing Is A Fluid Journey: How Hurricane Katrina Changed Me
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