Last month, the world watched in horror as Houston was devastated by flooding waters caused by Hurricane Harvey. We watched daring rescues of families leaving everything behind as the waters rose in their houses. We watched evacuees flood into the convention center that quilters associate with the International Quilt Festival in Houston. Calls for aid were raised, and as while financial aid is needed most, there were also calls for quilts to help those who had lost everything. APQS and Missouri Star Quilt Co became collection centers for quilts when relief agencies needed them. Being a born and raised Floridian, hurricanes are a natural part of life for me, and still I had to turn off the news because of how horrible the devastation from Harvey was.
Two weeks later, Florida watched the developing Irma with increasing concern. Harvey was still fresh in everyone’s mind, but this was more than that. I have gone through countless hurricane preparations, and nothing ever came close to what I saw in the week leading up to Irma’s visit. We were dealing with shortages on bottled water eight days before landfall, shortages on gasoline six days before landfall, and ATMs started running out of cash five days before landfall. Social media was filled with people publicly shaming and yelling at family and friends in Florida to evacuate, not realizing how hard it is to actually evacuate, especially with a storm this size, and creating more stress in an already extremely stressful situation.
Irma was different. Not only was she the entire size of the state, her eye was huge, which meant the damaging winds would extend out close to 70 miles from the center, instead of the normal 10-20. On top of that, her track kept changing and it wasn’t known if she was going to hit the east coast, west coast or go right up the center of the state. You could evacuate and end up being in the place that eventually gets hit. This was still in the minds of anyone who went through Charlie.
By Thursday night, the track was shifting off the east coast and more towards the west coast. Mandatory evacuations for my area had been called. I knew what I would take with me and what I would leave behind and where I would go, but it didn’t make it any easier. Having planned to ride out the storm, I had to quickly secure everything in one night instead of the 3 days that I had planned out. Friday morning, I started my evacuation, along with several million other people. There are really only 3 roads out of Florida, and a large chunk of Florida residents were on those roads trying to get out. Including all the people from the east coast who had evacuated to the west coast thinking they would be safe there.
What normally would take me only 4 ½ hours turned into an 11 hour crawl in 96 degree heat with no AC. There were many times I thought about turning back but as the day progressed the outlook for my hometown looked worse and worse. By Saturday, it was looking like my hometown had a very good chance to be wiped off the map. By the time I made it to my mother’s house, I was a complete stress-filled mess filled with an insane amount of nervous energy.
In an effort to take my mind off things, I brought several quilting projects with me. I thought this would be the perfect time to get some work done. By the time I unpacked everything, I couldn’t focus on quilting and ended up working at a sandbag location shoveling sand for hours just to burn up some of the adrenaline pumping through my body so that I might be able to get a few hours of sleep. As the track solidified and my hometown was relatively safe from a direct impact, I finally calmed down enough to work on some of the projects I brought with me.
In the end, I only managed to sew binding on a baby quilt and cut out blocks for one quilt. Nothing like I thought I would get done. Once I finally was able to go home, by body had finally had enough. It took me two days to hook my sewing machine back up, something that normally is done minutes within getting home. I have had a hard time finding the energy to do anything. Even drawing sew lines on blocks became an exhausting endeavor.
We got lucky, where others did not. It’s been over a week now and normality is finally beginning to resume. Everyone in my area has power again, the majority of the debris has been cleared, and repairs have begun. Slowly but surely food is being restocked in stores. I’m slowly getting back into quilting, but this evacuation, more than any other, has taken a serious toll on me. I’m having to take more time to focus on my body’s needs more than anything else, which means less quilting or anything else enjoyable. Hopefully everything will go back to normal soon.
