Storm
This weekend my county is engaged in a number of two-year anniversary events marking the still-incomplete recovery from Hurricane Harvey. I took a screenshot of this radar picture showing the landfall. It's usually hard to tell what the underlying geography is, so I photoshopped a bit, adding green outlines around the inhabited peninsulas (the southern one being Rockport/Fulton proper, and the northern one being ours, Lamar), and black outlines around the uninhabited peninsulas (including the Aransas Wildlife Refuge, home of whooping cranes in the winter) and the barrier islands. The "X" is about where our house is. This picture still gives me goosebumps, remembering the sense of a huge wave about to break over us. Metaphorically, I mean; we weren't overwashed, but the radar pictures we got before we lost our signal looked like a 40,000-foot atmospheric breaker about to crash.
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We were certainly all worried for you, but I'm sure that paled in comparison to your own concerns facing that 'wave'. Glad you came through well, and that your community is rebuilding, even if it's taken some time.
Despite the undeniable anxiety at the time, our own house was so little damaged that it always brings me up short to watch the commemorative videos detailing the experiences of others. The people with the state windstorm insurance pool (TWIA) had a horrible experience. Our eye doctor just got back into her home earlier this summer! This is a well-heeled, sophisticated, responsible lady with insurance. TWIA has been horrible. The eye doctor is on her ninth TWIA representative in two years, working on this claim.
I wonder if you have reflected on how much the storm and its aftermath recommitted you to the exercise of public virtue. Your community has benefited in one clear way from your renewed interest in local politics: it has you now, engaged and working to make things better. I have the strong impression that it was the storm that sparked your commitment to getting involved and trying to make things work -- at least, work better than before.
Oh, there has never been any doubt in my mind. I was very much a hermit before the storm. It changed me profoundly. The impulse to run for office became quite irresistible, and there was no mistaking the source of the drive. Now and then I get tired of the hubbub of the office and momentarily regret taking it on, then I remember what I felt like before I did it. I never want to go back to that. I was wasting my life, just coasting. I have rarely in my life been so sure about anything. It took a while to make my husband understand how perfectly determined I was, how little choice I really had about it.
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