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Left Out in the Freezing Sun, We Lost Our Seasons

Growing up in the Midwest, there were absolute seasons.  When the calendar flipped from Summer to Autumn, the weather and temperatures would change accordingly.  You knew you had a good couple of good months of cool, calm, “football weather” before the Winter doldrums would come knocking on your door with wind, sleet, snow and ice and what felt like an eternal darkness.

Today, it appears global warming has changed our seasonal expectations, and that is a comprehensively sad fact. My FedEx guy, sweating in the humid heat of the Autumn one day and freezing in the wintry Autumn wind the next, said it best: “We’ve lost our seasons.”

Continue reading → Left Out in the Freezing Sun, We Lost Our Seasons

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Storm of the Year: Ten Sentence Story #168

Jerald and his wife were excited enough about the upcoming Halloween holiday when they found out that there was going to be an enormous storm blowing through their Queens neighborhood, and that many of their friends in Brooklyn were going to have to evacuate their homes.

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Mario Tama: Coming Back

Mario Tama is a photographer for Getty Images.  He recorded the immediate effect and the ongoing aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  Mario knows what the rest of us have conveniently forgotten:  New Orleans is still fallow and fragile as it tries to weight up, once again, from its soaking ashes.

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Razing Mississippi

Will Hurricane Katrina demand several cities be razed and wiped from the earth and rebuilt from the ground up in the interest of public health and safety? Should places like New Orleans — a living suicide trap of a city dangerously poised below sea level between walls of water — even be rebuilt?

New Orleans Drowned

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Hurricaneville, North Carolina

by Diane Buccheri

Oh, what to do? Stay or go? It’s always a nerve wracking decision and after the decision is made, the following consequences are equally nerve wracking.

My nerves were never wracked in such a way before I moved to a small island of shifting sand surrounded by water though hurricanes have always appeared in my life. Having grown up in a wooded area of suburban Connecticut, a few category 1 hurricanes (the weakest category of hurricane force wind speeds) visited my Connecticut home, knocking down trees and power lines. Trees were crashed together and often knocked each other over, but I never felt life endangered. At college in southern California I was huddled in the dormitory during a western, Pacific hurricane (much to my surprise). The first floor of the dorm was glass enclosed and the glass got smashed in. School was canceled for a day or two, the Santa Monica pier was toppled, and the horses at the ranch where I was riding became spooked and not rideable. Oh, too, I went for a swim at the Santa Monica beach and found myself tumbled, pinned to the ocean floor, wondering if my neck had been snapped, and pulled out by my big, Hawaiian surfer boy classmate who had accompanied me to the beach that weekend following the hurricane.

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