~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I live in a house on a river in Florida.
No. I used to live in a house on a river in Florida.
My little place sits on the banks of Alligator Creek. The 1,000-square foot house has been there since 1972, suffering little or no damage over the years of hurricanes that hit maybe five or 10 years apart – one year a picture off the wall in the kitchen, a slice in a window screen from a passing oak branch, palm tree debris in the yard.
But Climate Change is on the march. A prior hurricane, Ian of two years ago, peeled the carport off my house and parked it in my neighbor’s driveway; no damage elsewhere to my house. I did not think about Ian being the first scout of an advancing enemy. This latest hurricane, Helene, was 400 miles wide, swirling over Florida from coast to coast. It was hungry to gobble everything. everything in its path, including my house, and me, had I stayed.
The real Climate Change has arrived.
Helene surged my tidal creek, which empties into Charlotte Harbor and then into the Gulf of Mexico. The creek rose four feet up the side of my house and then six inches into my house. By the time I was able to enter the following day, unbeknownst to me, the wooden floors had begun to sag and slither into a lake under the house. I did not eyeball this at first nor feel the sag of the floor as I walked in; I did not notice the water marks six inches up my walls . . . so I was fortunate to merely step three or four inches through the parquet in the hall before plunging up to my hip to the standing water below. I leapt into the kitchen, where, because of the very old and thick linoleum, I did not fall through.
When I first bought the house, I knew the kitchen floor would be the first thing to be replaced – the gold and brown and white design was straight out of the Seventies, and I did not approve. But as those first weeks of my grieving habitation passed (my metaphor for that time was that the house held me in its arms, a sanctuary where my three years dead husband was not coming out of the woodwork, and the place was just my size – one bedroom, a view of a river and its trees and wildlife 15 yards away). I became fond of the Retro look the linoleum suggested to me and eventually painted my kitchen cabinets to rhyme with my middle-aged floor . . . the once expensive, thick, well-made cover that 14 years later saved me from dropping into the two-foot-deep pond under my house.
Friends helped me save a few reachable pieces of clothing, a drawer full of costume jewelry, all the art off my walls – really, the paintings the only valuable objects to me – before the joists started to go.
The books of a five-tiered, six-foot-long bookshelf leaned precariously, as if the water imps were enticing it to buckle and send all the literature under the house. We transferred the novels and non-fictions – the Betsy, Tacy and Tib series and the Nancy Drews of my childhood, dozens of poetry collections and books on words, the latest political diatribes – the dining room table. We left for the night.
The next morning, entering my place through the front door onto the cement slab of the lanai, and peering into the dining room before I dared set foot on a floor, I saw that the far end of the table had fallen through and emptied all the books at that end into the murky muck beneath. My friend and
I salvaged the half that remained on the angled table, handed them through to a glass table on the lanai, where I wondered briefly if the glass would collapse like the floors.
It did not, and soon we had a small stack of what was left of my books (I had books in my bedroom, my bathroom, my office, my closets – gone gone gone). The remainder fit into three boxes.
Before serious mold set in, I was able to spend two days alone on my front lanai gazing at my tidal creek and its Nat Geo world of great blue herons, bald eagles, osprey, ibis, jumping fish and cruising alligators. I sipped from half a bottle of Irish whiskey, remembering good times with friends and family as well as fulfilling times all by myself, learning the consolation of solitude. At first, sitting on the lanai of my sagging favorite place, I was a little pissy about my loss (poor me) but soon came ‘round to the fact that life is life and unforeseen; failure, loss and hurt are as regular as happy days.
I was alive and well, with three pairs of shorts and shirts, two pairs of shoes (and my lipstick!) and staying safely nearby with my daughter, who came some time ago to ease me into my dotage; little did she know she came to save me from falling apart with my disintegrating house. I was soon accepting thankfulness into my heart for the years I got to live in a little house on a little river in sunny, now raging, Florida.
Two hurricanes – one from the Atlantic and the other approaching western Mexico from the Pacific to rendezvous in the Gulf. They hurry this way as I write. Time to move on.
