Flood: A Hurricane Essay
Category 1
It starts with a small. A crawl. A creep of so much potential. The wind bending rain oh so slight. Leaves shaken into gutters. Awake to a slew of scatter in the pool. Branches. Siding. An off-color shingle not belonging to this house.
At four years old, I cry endlessly into hurricane-struck nights. The booming of thunder. The strobes of lightning. I’m left paralyzed under blankies, clutching my dark pink bolster pillow. I imagine a happy place: sunlit swings, light breeze carrying birdsong, my grandmother’s palm caressing the small of my back. She was there to greet me at birth, to raise me in these years that my parents’ work schedules drown them away from me. I grow up knowing her as Ma, knowing her touch almost as my own. How easily I fall into her arms. How her comfort engulfs me endlessly. I fall asleep to the hush, dreaming of her warmth.
Category 2
My father pays to have the two trees in our new house’s front yard removed the second year we live there. I find them only in photographs, their mass towering above our two-story shelter. Tall. Skinny. All legs, barely any limbs.
He says they’re dangerous. That the winds here in Houston get over 100 miles per hour. How it could easily carry my six-year-old self off and knock over any tree it wants. This is why we need to remove the trees, he tells me. That they could fall on us at any moment. Crush us while we sleep. I cry more at the thought of being blown away far from my family.
The removal takes a week. Maybe two. I remember walking back home from first-grade, shy and small. I avoid eye contact with the tree surgeons sawing down our steeples. My eyes focused only on the walkway leading back up to our front door. I can only recall the scatter. Logs, stumps, stray bark, the sawdust clinging to my Skechers. Ma awaits me at the doorway, gestures me inside, her gentleness a warmth on my back.
Category 3
The question is not if there will be damage but how much. We gauge from the reactions of people, the stocking of our grocery stores. There is no bottled water left. There will be water to come and come and come.
In my high school years, Ma begins to shrink. Her spine bending downwards, as if the earth was attempting to reclaim her. Time falls in love with her slowly. She gains a teeter-totter walk accompanied by a cane she hates. She loses her right eye to drooping skin and entropion. She becomes a rebellious teenager, fighting against all the things she’s being told again and again she cannot do. This is when I choose to stay in Houston for college.
Every other Sunday, I help Ma grocery shop at the Viet Hoa in Bellaire. She is 90 but still insists on pushing the cart herself, slinging her four-pronged cane into its body and skirting away for me to follow. Her normal stagger turns into a drifting wave. How she dodges the slew of Asian aunties attempting to score the best produce, asserting her body and parting the wave of deal-adoring women. They know better than to get in my Ma’s way. To disrespect a time-touched odyssey. She journeys on to where the bagged jumbo carrots are. I follow her, always in delight.
Category 4
I am 22 when Ma’s body greets me at the hospital. An empty vessel still needing of aftercare. My aunt hands me a wet cloth, my mother gestures me towards the body. My mother, knower all of the rituals, has instructed me all of my life. She guides. I wash the body’s feet. A trickle of uncomfort appears. I know how light causes refraction when crossing from one object to another. I know this body is no longer Ma. I know her body has buoyed.
There is no rain for the wake. The motorcade. The procession. Only after her body lowers, so does the rain. My mother tells me rain after a burial is good luck. Tells me how her life has started its journey again.
The rain does not stop.
Hurricane Harvey follows Ma’s departure. My father worries the neighbors’ trees will fall onto our house. The flood line rises and rises and rises. The updates drown my newsfeed: Bellaire is underwater. Buffalo Bayou is underwater. The BE SOMEONE sign is almost underwater.
A migration of fire ants surges into our kitchen, desperate to find refuge from the water. Their bodies speckle our white laminate countertops like light off a disco ball. There are hundreds of them. They keep coming. Trying to escape. Trying to live. I know I have to kill them. After fifteen minutes, their carcasses are clump squished in endless paper towels and Lysol. My heartrate, an inescapable. My sorries, a procession.
Category 5
Flood: the sinking of soil, the overflow of wind, the question of staying or going. This is when a will becomes liquid.
After she passed, I knew I could leave Houston—our bodies now realms apart. My worries now a dissolved thing. She will not be there for my graduations, my tea ceremony, my birthdays. I am no longer her Apple, her unspoken but obvious favorite, the granddaughter she dances with at weddings. But I know I will see her again.
I dream about her in pieces. I am small again each time—a drop in the pools of her arms. Her gentleness, a gulf.
She will be there for my next birth, my first steps, to teach me all over again how to say “I love you!” in her sing-song voice. I jetsam myself adrift—a tourist of here and there until I meet her again. Where she goes, I follow always.
