Coping, or not

This flood experience has taught me -- as if I needed the lesson -- that I'm not the kind of person you want around in a disaster. On the TV news about disasters they always show people who are sad... but coping. They look bleakly at their ruined house/land/belongings and they shake their heads and then they get to work. They cope.

Every morning when I get up, I think: what am I going to do? what am I going to do? And the day goes downhill from there.

And yet, of course, I do cope, in my own fashion: because I'm a mom and a wife and a homeowner, and, God help us, a landlord. Caring for the twins, which I still struggle with after five and a half years, is actually pretty easy compared to being a homeowner and landlord after a flood. These days, taking care of the twins is my BREAK.

Today the FEMA inspector, Tom, came. We were pretty prepared for the experience, having heard about it from other people. He was pleasant and businesslike, not smarmy like the insurance adjustor. None of this "Well, if you had flood insurance... if you had a lower deductible... if you were a worthwhile human being, like me, but you're not..." (OK, the insurance adjustor didn't actually say that, but he implied it, snickering.) (OK, he didn't really snicker. But it was lurking behind his smarmy little smile.) Anyway, the FEMA inspector was pleasant and businesslike. He didn't promise us much, but he was not pleased with what had happened to our furnace.

He told us he was going to recommend that we get a grant to replace it and to clean up our flooded crawl space. He also told us, interestingly, that if we get turned down, we should appeal, that people often get money if they appeal. So we'll see. When he left, he said to me, "Hope you feel better," having listened to me cough and sneeze and sniffle for the past half hour, and he sounded sincere.

Unfortunately he also told us that we can't get money for our rental property. We'll have to use a Small Business Administration loan to fix that up. And a few hours after he left, I got an email from the property management company that helps us manage Clifford's house. They'd sent a contractor over to inspect that house and he had a long list of things that needed to be done, NOT EVEN COUNTING the furnace. For example, the bathroom needs to be redone because the ceiling leaked during the heavy rains and the water got into the drywall and the flooding damaged the linoleum. And of course the roof has to be repaired, the damage which the smarmy insurance adjustor referred to as "wear and tear." Seventeen inches of rain is not "wear and tear!" Anyway, I emailed them back asking how much they thought all these repairs would cost, because we'd try to get an SBA loan for that amount. But we can't get a loan for an enormous amount of money. How could we ever pay it back?

Traumatized by that email exchange, I went out in the backyard to look at the mess. We've been working and working on it, and it doesn't look one tiny bit better.

I filled another big black bag with ruined books and junk, and then I dragged it out to the front of the house, where Rocket Boy was dumping his mopping bucket on the lawn, and told him about the email from the property management folks. And then I started to cry, and Arlene, our nice neighbor, came over and talked to me, and I cried and cried (which actually helped clear my sinuses a little). I confessed to her that I was tired of dealing with helpers, that I just couldn't be polite and grateful to anyone any longer, and she understood. And then I said I was going to go work in the yard, that work was the only thing that could make me feel better.

So I did. I filled bag after bag and dragged them to the front lawn (where, we've been told, our garbage company will pick them up next week). It was horrible, it was dirty -- everything is MUDDY -- it was depressing. I threw away Rocket Boy's mother's stuff and that box of papers about my dissertation. I found a box that I remember packing up years ago -- I had gone through all my old linguistics class stuff and chosen to keep only the material that I'd really enjoyed and found interesting. All destroyed now. Who cares? I'm not a linguist anymore. Into the garbage bag it went.

After a bit Arlene came to check on me, and just then Rocket Boy brought me the bag of Christmas tree skirts and stockings. Felt, brocade -- I suppose we could have tried to clean them, but none of them looked as though they would survive. In the bag, I found the Christmas tree skirt my mother made for me long ago and pulled it out -- after first removing an earthworm. I showed Arlene, as the pieces came apart in my hands, how my mother had put together scenes from our traditional family Christmases out of felt and appliqued material -- snippets of material from actual clothes that family members had worn -- and around the bottom of the skirt she'd written the first lines of various favorite carols. And then I stuffed it back into the bag, along with a garden spider, tied the bag up, and took it out to the curb. "I don't need a Christmas tree skirt to remember my mother," I said defiantly, and then I cried and cried.

But you know, it's true. I loved that Christmas tree skirt, but I loved my mother more, and I will never forget her. It would take a lot more than a flood to do that.

Tonight, as we were waiting for the pizza delivery man (thank you, Risa!), I fetched a ruined photo album (with pictures of Rocket Boy's mom from the 30s and 40s, back in Germany) and some other things that I'd found a few days ago, but left sitting in a bush, because I didn't know what to do with them. I put them on a tray and put the tray in our freezer.

See them there, on the lower shelf? They're probably trash, probably not salvageable. But there's a chance that we might be able to save some of them. Some types of old photos can live through a lot, and freezing is often the first step to saving them. We'll leave them in the freezer, along with all that ice cream, until we're more ready to deal with them. Ready to cope.