This Isn't Going to be Easy

After a disaster, everything is hard.

My husband and I went to the house to meet with a contractor. We had to get up extra early to drive to the town where our house is located. The traffic wasn’t as bad as we feared, so we got there early enough to sort through more belongings. A lot of things are ruined, but some are salvageable.

My husband went into the backyard to check on our storage shed while I fed some of the feral colony we used to take care of before the flood. It hurts to see them so thin. When he returned, he was upset.

“You have to see this,” he said.

I walked out into the backyard, and he pointed at the far side of the storage shed. I was shocked to see that someone had pried off the siding and knocked over the boxes inside to get in.

“They stole the lawnmower and I don’t know what else,” he said.

Inside, more than half the boxes and their contents were a mushy mess. We hadn’t unpacked when we moved to the house in November 2024 because of the planned renovations. We’d stored most of our possessions in two storage units in our yard.

Heartbroken at the damage, I started going through the mound of boxes that had been knocked over. All my autographed books, some now out of print or from authors who have passed, were destroyed. Some of the anthologies that I had stories included were in that box, too. Irreplaceable. The publishing house is long gone, the publisher deceased.

I dug through the mess, moving what could be saved to fresh boxes to take to our new place. My eyes started to burn like someone was pouring chemicals into them. I escaped the shed, pulled off my mask, and breathed in fresh air.

My heart felt broken.

The contractor arrived, surveyed the house, and took measurements. He explained just how much would have to be done to make the house livable. The house will have to be pretty much gutted. When we told him how much FEMA had given us to make the house livable, he laughed in disbelief.

Later that night, I cried for a long time.