Almost any other night, we would have been lying in bed when tens of tons of oak tree crashed through the ceiling. But on April 4, I was visiting my parents in Virginia, and my husband was downstairs watching the NCAA basketball final.
I married a Boy Scout, and that might have saved him. John had just remembered that the American flag in the front yard should be taken down in the rain. He went out the front door, heard the wind roar and something crack, and sensed large unseen things falling in the darkness. He ran back inside and realized there was a tree inside the house.
And so we are homeless. Sitting here watching our basset hound Bud sleep off the Xanax he needed last night, with my husband dozing safely upstairs in a spare bedroom of his parents’ welcoming house, I know how fortunate we are.
I try not to be maudlin. But I can’t always help it. If John had gone to brush his teeth and get ready for bed instead of going to get the flag, he would have been in the downstairs bathroom, which one minute looked like something out of a Restoration Hardware catalog and the next minute was crushed into rubble.
By the Wednesday after the storm, the tree had been lifted from our house and we went to see the damage. I thought I was prepared. I’d seen the aftermath of disasters natural and unnatural as CNN’s environment reporter. I’d been to post-Katrina Mississippi searching for lost Brits when I was a vice consul for the U.K. I knew what to expect. But of course, it’s different when it’s your house.
We were so proud of that house: a neo-colonial from the 1940s that my history-buff husband said looked a little like some presidential birthplace. Thick wood plank siding painted cream, and inside, old-fashioned plaster walls, cool to the touch and comfortingly solid, with picture rails up top so you could hang paintings from silk cords just like Martha Washington did.
We loved the master bedroom. No grand master bath — we were hoping to add that someday. But the bedroom itself was a generous — practically gigantic by older-home standards — with a decadent fireplace and big windows, and French doors letting in even more light through the giant leafy trees. A big bed, solid old hardwood floors like they don’t make anymore. There was a sign propped on the mantelpiece that said, “Always kiss me goodnight.”
Two days after the storm, we crawled into our bedroom over broken planks and chunks of insulation and branches, careful not to touch the door that was propping up some of what was left of the ceiling. Our warm, safe cocoon of a bedroom was split open.
I try not to think about the ifs. If I had been home that night — if we had been, as we usually are at that hour, snug in bed, me watching TV or reading a book and John working on a legal document or typing on a laptop, if I had been invoking our sign and getting my goodnight kiss, we probably could have survived because of the glancing blow the tree struck the bed.
But if one of us had gotten up for just a minute — to get a drink of water, to comfort our storm-phobic basset hound, to plug a cellphone into its charger — one of us would be planning a funeral right now.
As everyone reminds us — and as we have told ourselves dozens of times — the only truly important thing is that we were not hurt. We have family, friends and insurance. Structural damage means we will either tear down and start from scratch, or build our house back as it was, more or less.
I thank God for sparing us. And while I want desperately for everything to just feel normal again, I also hope the unsettling awareness we have right now — of how fiercely precious it is, to have the person who loves you whole and healthy by your side — stays with us, just a little bit, forever.
Natalie Pawelski Rogers is vice president of Cater Communications East and lives in Atlanta.
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