The Morning After

We evacuated to northern Miami; to a place called Kendall. I remember coming out of a dark hall way. We saw through holes in the plywood into the backyard of their house. The pool was black. There was tar in it. The screened enclosure was a twisted mass of metal. It danced into the tar pit, through the air and seemed to look for the rest of its body.

The sky was still gray. Before the storm the sky was the most beautiful thing I could remember seeing. I have never seen a sky like I did the day before the storm. I asked my Dad, “What’s it going to be like?” “I don’t know,” he said. I kept asking. I thought I woke up early that day because my room was so dark but when I went outside the sun shined like it never had before. There was already plywood nailed in front of my bedroom window making my room dark.

But it was gray now. My Dad told me to come out front. I was eight and my sisters Liz and Rachel were six and two. I went out front. They stayed inside.

The house in Kendall was on a hill. It was a rich person’s house and their nice red tiles had blown away. Streets made valleys in this neighborhood. They became rivers. I saw a man in a flat boat float by. He had wild eyes and looked at us. We were on an island. He kept rowing. I have no idea where he went but there really wasn’t anywhere to go.

We drove a white Dodge minivan circa 1990 or 1989 or some year to the house in Kendall. All of its windows were busted out. The storm happened in 1992 and I remember finding glass between the cushions in that van in 1995. That’s the year we left Florida that year.

Everything was broken so we started clearing debris. We picked up the front door first and propped it in the door way. Every day we worked. My sisters blonde and brunette watched from holes in the walls.

There was still food and gas for the generator. The only way to occupy time was taking trees, metal, roofs, cars, branches, tiles, tires, stop signs, bits of metal, animal corpses, toilets, chairs, window frames, wet clothes, dolls, toys, photographs, memories and put them into giant piles that reached up to heaven. We burned those piles.

One day I was sweeping glass up. I stopped. I had started a collection of rusted bits of metal. They were easy to collect. I started looking for them and heard the chainsaws rev up. I went to watch my Dad and other men chainsaw a giant gumbo limbo tree into small pieces and throw them in the pile that reached to Heaven to be burned.

My Mom came to me then. “It’s too dangerous for you to be this far away from the house,” she said. She took my hand and led me closer to the house. When we came around the corner my blonde two-year-old sister with crystal blue eyes that look into your soul and understand things that they shouldn’t held my yellow broom and swept up glass. My Mother fell to her knees and cried. I watched her cry, not understanding, not knowing and took my sisters hand to lead her inside.