I was standing in waist-deep water in my garage at 4:00 a.m. trying to convince myself that my new Subaru, which now had sewer water lapping over the dashboard, was going to be OK.  I had come into the garage to find a flat place to catch a little sleep, since every flat place inside the house was either underwater, floating, or crammed with the few things we had managed to remove from harm's way when the water, impossibly, actually came into our home.  I put a small dent in the roof of the car as I climbed on to it, and I remember thinking that the dent would hurt the resale value. It was an irrelevant worry.

            On Saturday, when the sun finally came up and the water finally went down, I  slogged around in the debris and thought that, barring the day my father died, this was the worst day of my life. Unhappily, I was wrong. Several days later, at about the time that the city was patting itself on the back for being such a stalwart and responsible champion in the face of tragedy, my husband and I were sorting one-by-one through every single thing we had collected in our adult lifetimes. For each item, there were more wrenching decisions—How much does this mean to me? Can I replace it? Is it worth the disgusting job of cleaning the sewage and mold off of it in order to keep it in my life? For most things, the sad answer was no. No for the lifetime's collection of books, no for the photograph albums, no for hundreds of vinyl LP's preserved from our college days, no for the stacks of business papers from my office, no for the appliances, no for the cars, no for my husband's favorite red leather easy chair, no for the TV and VCR that toppled into the water, no for the used piano that I bought in graduate school and paid off at $10 a month for 5 years before it was really and truly mine. 

            And after the awfulness of throwing our life away onto the curb, there was the continuing despair of seeing it all out there again, day after day after day, when the heavy trash pickup once again failed to make it into our neighborhood. So everything we had owned and cherished sat there, getting moldier and wetter and dirtier and picked over by scavengers who roamed our once quiet streets.

            It is now just two months since Allison came and destroyed our neighborhood. My street retains the look of a war zone—no one can come home yet, and many will never come home because of the extensive damage.

            After these two months, as my husband and I gradually rebuild our home and our life, I am filled with such anger that it scares me, for I am not an angry person. Anger at an unwanted supermarket and an unneeded apartment complex that now occupy the wetlands upstream on White Oak Bayou that once helped to keep my home safe.  Anger at the ill-conceived concrete on-ramps for the new hike and bike bridge that seem to have been perfectly placed to divert the overflow from the bayou directly down my street. Anger at local government agencies, who apparently have no flood control strategy other than acquiescing to the demands of developers.  Has my 50-year old neighborhood, which had never flooded, which was home to old people and young families, become a detention pond for upstream development on White Oak Bayou?