DEL.ICIO.USAfter Katrina, woman loses Alpharetta house in fire
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, August 31, 2008
The home in New Orleans that Dylynn Waters lovingly decorated sits two blocks from Lake Pontchartrain. Four levels of vintage 1940s. Milky white Corona glass in the kitchen. A chrome and enamel Anderson stove. Hardwoods rescued from the cover of shag green carpet. Dentil molding. A marble mantel over the fireplace.
The house contained Dylynn’s myriad collections. Antique furniture. Cookbooks — 250 of them. Russian lacquered boxes. Fine china. Eleven Oriental and Persian rugs.
ALLEN SULLIVAN / aesullivan@ajc.com
Dylynn Waters(right) and her daughter Sarah stand in the Alpharetta home she shared with husband Gary.
A million memories.
Three years ago, Hurricane Katrina turned it all into a blitz of green, white, purple, red, blue fuzz.
At 50, Dylynn felt as homeless as the grimy old men loitering on street corners. She thought she’d lost everything that makes a house a home. She thought there was little left to ground her.
She found out she was wrong, but it took three years of healing and another terrible test of her fortitude to alter her heart.
Dylynn had to wait 2 1/2 months after Katrina before she could return to her house. She wore a mask and a special protective suit. She had never smelled dead bodies but imagined it was similar to the odor in her house. The doors were swollen shut. Insects crept and crawled on everything.
Still, she managed to save a few things. She patted herself on the back for having moved her favorite rug to a bedroom on an upper floor that stayed dry. She recovered a glass-encased football autographed by Alabama coach Bear Bryant in 1980, a championship year. It was her daddy’s prized possession.
But the family’s photographs — hundreds of prints of Sarah as a baby, of Caroline’s birthday parties, of William’s baseball games — were washed away forever.
Later, she called her relatives. “Do you have any photos of my children? Please send them to me.” She collected a small stack and secured them in a Ziploc bag.
Dylynn grieved for a home in a city that had seemed so distasteful to her at first. She had not wanted to relocate from Dallas in the early 1980s, but she was a saleswoman for computer giant IBM, and her career called her to the Crescent City.
There she met Gary Waters. There, they married, had three kids and settled into the house on Robert E. Lee Boulevard.
When Katrina threatened, the Waters did what they always did in a hurricane. They packed four days of clothes in a suitcase and drove to Montgomery, Dylynn’s hometown.
Dylynn considered packing her jewelry. Instead, she chose to take freshly purchased meat from the freezer — pricey filets.
A few days later, the Waterses arrived in Alpharetta, where Gary had an office for his retail technology business. They lived in a hotel, then moved into a pool house owned by a friend. They peered helplessly at satellite images of their New Orleans home on Google Earth — black, representing water, filled the screen.
They learned that Gary’s family’s coastal home in Pass Christian, Miss., was wiped out by a 35-foot tidal wave.
They were among thousands of Katrina evacuees who played the difficult game of survival in Atlanta.
Dylynn thanked God for her family. But they gathered elsewhere for Thanksgiving and Christmas. What were holidays without a home?
As months passed, Dylynn and Gary realized they would have to find more permanent housing in Georgia.
Dylynn wanted to rent. Buying meant they would never go back home. Gary was more practical.
The couple purchased a cluster house in an Alpharetta subdivision. For Dylynn, it was a tough adjustment. Cookie-cutter, she called it. Small, with a pretend kitchen. It was a comfortable house, but it was not home.
Slowly, she tried to make it that. She filled her new house on Emily Lane with things she salvaged from New Orleans. Gary told her their new house would feel cluttered with so many things. But Dylynn didn’t listen.
She brought back a pink vase that belonged to her great-grandmother. A tour book of New Orleans from the early 1900s — the family laughed at the 100-year-old rates for hotel rooms on Canal Street. The rug she stored on an upper floor and saved from the water. The lacquered boxes.
Daughter Sarah moved to Atlanta with a public relations job. One of her clients was the Georgia Emergency Management Agency. “What?” she said, taken aback by the irony. “GEMA as in FEMA?”
FEMA — as in the white trailer plopped on the Waterses’ property in New Orleans. FEMA, as in frustration and heartache — the federal agency was blamed for delays in getting food, water and necessities to people trapped by Katrina.
Sarah thought her parents would make perfect poster children for a new GEMA campaign to promote disaster preparedness here in Georgia.
Dylynn could do that now. As the third anniversary of Katrina approached, life was settling back down.
Then, on a sultry Sunday afternoon in July, while Gary and Dylynn were at Callaway Gardens, Sarah called her mother’s cellphone.
“Mom,” she said. “Your house is on fire.”
A neighbor had thrown hot coals from his meat smoker into a plastic trash can, and flames quickly spread to the Waterses’ house. Dylynn drove back to Atlanta only to see open sky from the downstairs rooms of her house. The fire had gutted almost everything. Even the rug that survived a wall of water did not escape the fire’s fury.
Sarah couldn’t cope with her family’s misfortune: “Why did this happen to my parents? Why do they have to lose another house? Why do they have to start all over again?”
Dylynn found herself back in an Alpharetta hotel room, just as she had been three years ago. Homeless.
Yet, she felt a calm settle over her. She did not outwardly mourn. Nor did she feel the loss that had overtaken her after Katrina. She didn’t even shed a tear.
“As much as I love possessions, I finally learned I don’t have to have all that stuff,” she said.
A few days after the fire, a young woman overheard Dylynn talking to a friend about the tragedy.
The woman had a 14-month-old baby and another on the way. She was staying at the same hotel as Dylynn because her house had also burned.
All she wanted was a home, a nest for her babies.
Dylynn hugged her. For the first time since the fire, she cried, but it wasn’t for herself.
Katrina had taught her to redefine “home.” And Dylynn knew she still had one.
Services »
