Flowers Bloom

So, I am back home and I am bone weary. And I am brain weary. We had a wonderful visit up north, celebrating the wedding engagement of our son and his fiance’, and enjoyed visiting other family members. We did some hiking on the Appalachian Trail. And also, we might as well have been hiking in New York City. (14,000 steps in one day) I was so busy with all of the fun and the action and getting home and getting organized and getting unpacked and getting our groceries replenished, that it is just now, when I have fully and completely realized that my mind and my body and my spirit have yet to process what we have collectively been through in my community. I am tired. I am quiet. I am taking a big exhale.

We moved to Florida for my husband’s job in 2011. We have been through many hurricanes since then, but only one other time did we decide to evacuate. (that was for Irma in 2017) People who aren’t Floridians watch the hysterical, oversized, 24/7 news stories about hurricanes and wonder why we all don’t just flee the state, and also wonder why we ever go back. It’s not that simple. Nothing ever is. People don’t evacuate their homes for hurricanes for many reasons: finances, pets, stubbornness, a perhaps false sense of security from past experiences, horrific traffic and gas shortages, the uncertainty of where a hurricane is going to hit despite the gigantic “cone of certainty” ominously pasted over the entire state of Florida, for every storm (there are many, many recounted stories of people evacuating to places that end up getting the worst of the storms. For instance, one acquaintance told us that she tried to escape Hurricane Helene by going to her dad’s cabin in Lake Lure, which is in the mountains of North Carolina, with her elderly grandmother and young child. You can imagine the rest of that story, a story that she will likely tell for the rest of her life. Sigh.)

Since living here since the summer of 2011, this is the worst that I have ever seen our own local communities hit by hurricanes. It is sad. It is horrific. The pictures that you are seeing on the news are not exaggerated. Helene flooded most of our coastal communities. People have piled their ruined belongings, furniture, carpeting, mattresses, drywall at the end of each driveway, or have dumped them on specified empty lots, where the piles of debris are growing up like instant, ugly little mountains. Right after Hurricane Helene, in less than two weeks, Hurricane Milton decided to stir the pot with ferocious winds and rains and tornadoes. The devastation is immense. Trees, and street lights, and billboards, fences, and people’s roofs have been tossed around like Milton was an angry three-year old, throwing around his legos.

And yet, the facts are, most of us are relatively unscathed. Most of us (in our county alone there is over a million people who live here) survived with our lives, and our homes mostly intact. Most of us had some small, inexpensive clean-ups and repairs to do, and maybe some raking up of some sticks and leaves in our yards. And so most of us, walk around with that sickly feeling of great relief which is mixed with some sad and empathetic survivor’s guilt, when we see what the hurricanes brought on to others less fortunate than us.

So why do we live in Florida? Why is my one small county densely packed with a million people? Why do we live with the fear of hurricanes every year, and why are we willing to pay four times the average cost of homeowners’ insurance compared to the rest of the country? You tell me. Why do you come to Florida for vacation? I bet almost everyone of you has been to Florida at least once. We have gorgeous beaches. We have amazing wildlife. We are surrounded by water everywhere. (and water is from whence we came) We get to experience beautiful sunshine almost every single day of our lives. We have something for everybody here. Florida is one of the few true melting pots, of the bigger melting pot of our own great country. You cannot feel out of place in Florida. Anything goes. We embrace “Florida Man” and everybody else.

Please don’t feel sorry for us Floridians. We get the hurricanes. We call them “the price we pay to live in paradise.” We understand, and we take on the risks. We are processing right now. We are licking our wounds. Some of us will decide that the price is no longer worth it, and will leave. And that is okay. In the end, we will all be okay. The sun still shines upon us, the land of flowers. Flowers bloom.