Hurricane season is, as usual, a time of crossing fingers, knocking wood, lighting candles, throwing salt, praying, drinking heavily and engaging in other various rituals of creative denial about our odds of getting wiped out.
Every year I’m on edge for the months of August and September, but this year seems even scarier than usual for a few reasons.
The hurricane forecast that comes out every spring always fills me with foreboding, but this season’s forecast was especially alarming. I don’t pretend to understand why – something about La Niña and extra-warm waters – but I am staying on high alert. It’s eerie to look at their list of hurricane names and wonder just which one might come along and ruin your life.
Then there’s the fact that Hurricane Beryl set records – forming so early, intensifying so quickly. Worrying about a storm in July is a shock to my system, but then again, I said the same thing about Hurricane Zeta just before Halloween in 2020. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the official hurricane season, June 1-Nov. 30, is planning to use more of its allotted days than in years past.
And then there’s yet another reason to be scared this season – in July, we had to sink $7,000 into a completely new HVAC system, and it would honestly be just our luck to have our house completely blown into the sea after making that upgrade. For most home repairs, we actually tell ourselves, “Let’s wait until after hurricane season.” Scuffed floors? Well, why bother fixing the floors when we could flood up to the rafters next month? We’ll worry about it later. Leaky roof? No sense in patching it during hurricane season. We’ll just put a bucket under it and hope for the best. But there’s no way to ignore or wait out a broken AC in July in New Orleans, and so we just had to bite the bullet and do it.
It all really underscores, though, how tentative living here can feel sometimes. It also seems very much like the city itself has taken our lackadaisical approach to basic home repairs on a much larger scale. Potholes? Clogged catch basins? Issues with pumping stations? Broken streetlights? Ehhhh, we’ll worry about it later. No point in fixing it now. It will just get broken again soon enough.
I get it, on some level. I mean, obviously I get it. I don’t really recommend my husband and my “put it off indefinitely” home maintenance philosophy as a good standard practice for mature adults, but I fully understand the temptation to delay making decisions, especially with the borderline reasonable rationalization that hurricane season is upon us – and then upon us yet again.
But I want to continue living here – as much as I hate home ownership at the moment, I love my house, scuffed floors and leaky roof and all. I love my neighbors. I love my neighborhood. I love my city. This is where I grew up and where I’m raising my kids.
It’s well past time for me – and the city – to grow up, face the music, and start making the needed repairs. Hurricane season will just keep happening, but in the meantime, we need to live our lives as if we might keep standing for another century at least, as if we might have a house we want to leave our children in a city that might still be functioning – at least as well as it is now.
We need to fix our floors. We need to fix our roof. The city needs to fix its crumbling infrastructure. We all need to get our act together.
If the two weeks we all spent bouncing around chasing cool air while waiting for our HVAC system to be operational again taught us anything, it’s that there is truly no place like home.
So while I will keep crossing fingers, knocking wood, lighting candles, throwing salt, praying, and – if I’m being fully honest – probably still drinking my fair share of wine until the hurricane season is safely behind us once again, I will also be making genuine efforts to improve my own home and the city I call home, right here and right now. I’m not waiting anymore.
There is no time like the present to start changing for the better. It’s not a new year, but we’ll just call it my Hurricane Season Resolution.
For more Eve, check out her blog “Joie d’Eve” on Tuesday mornings at myneworleans.com
