On August 28, 2005, in preparation for a hurricane that was in the Gulf, I left my home to go stay with a daughter and her family that lived about 1/2 mile from the beach in Pascagoula. I could have stayed at home but I chose to be with them rather than staying barricaded (plywood on windows ) in the house waiting to see what was going to happen. Well, most of you know what happened ..... we were to be participants in the fury of a storm named Katrina. The night before the storm none of us slept very well and were already exhausted the next morning when Katrina was going to pay us a very unexpected visit.

I am almost ashamed to say that we were heckling the hurricane and saying it probably was all a bunch of hype. My daughter and son in law were not born when Camille hit the Gulf Coast but I was. I resided in Gulfport at that time and had already experienced the unexpected and the unprecedented but somehow the old cliche "experience is the best teacher" didn't hold true for my not forcefully suggesting that we leave.

It was about 930AM when this fast moving water started rolling down the street, filling the yards very quickly and continued rising to frightening heights until it seems it was in the house in a matter of minutes. God was definitely with us as the plywood on the windows prevented glass breakage and the raging water from rushing inside and possibly collapsing the house. Had that happened, we have no doubt that we would have died that day. We huddled in an upstairs hallway at the top of the stairway with the four little children, a dog and five cats (four newborn kittens). We had seen the neighborhood houses, when looking out an upstairs window, with water reaching their roofs and their cars parked in driveways completely submerged as was the son in laws truck.

After no response from 911, we began praying without cessation. We learned later that what we each asked for was that the children's lives be spared. We remained in a state of terror until finally the water began to recede and we felt that we were going to survive. We didn't know then the extent of the widespread destruction all along our coastline and that the aftermath was going to take a lot more courage to survive than the actual storm.

So here we are one year later. We have cried, we have despaired, we have had many struggles but, you know what, we are going to make it!!