Hurricane Interim

Helene is aggressively hanging out in my current state-of-residence but we're okay!

After I taught my class on Wednesday I went to the gym as per usual and nothing seemed as though it was going to end unpredictably in the ensuing hours. My own Fiction Workshop class was held over Zoom that night, but that, I assumed, was because of a scheduled Author Visit from someone whose initial plan was to travel further than would be entirely advisable in what was predicted to be a sizable but not itself noteworthy storm. Ian was the first to inform me that all on-campus class-and-business was to be cancelled on Thursday and Friday, and shortly after I read the emails from the higher-ups confirming that yes, it’s all ceased for two days.

This felt strange because Wednesday was an especially sunny day, but New Orleanians know that pre-hurricane weather can fuck with you, so I understood why we were at home. Still, it took hours for the rain to fall. And when it came, how it came. Nothing too wild in our viscinity at this time of writing: trees are stretching their gravitational limits, but none of them are in danger of falling. Somehow, our neighborhood has power, even though we’ve been alerted that power lines are down on campus, half-a-mile away. This means we can make tea in our electric kettle and take humane showers and use the Internet etc., along with a host of other mundane acts that I tend to forget require electricity until it’s gone.

(Do we still capitalize Internet?)

Our nervewracking long-weekend continues. Helene is a tropical storm now, which means we in Georgia have, on the whole, less to worry about than we did this time yesterday, and our household got geographically lucky not being any higher up than we are. The navy-and-white wild bird who used to spend nights perched on a hanging nail in our carport came back today, taking up his post on his new favorite perch, the spines of an upstanding rake. I like to think he understands his spot in our car port to be a reliable place of safety and a port in the literal storm. When we moved here, he was a comical sphere of feathers, dotted with two sharp observant eyes. Now he’s a sleek, elegant adult bird, his head darting from side to side as he surveys our meteorological situation.

But today’s the day I have to stop using weather-stress as an excuse not to get done what technically should’ve been done two or three days ago. Don’t get me wrong, it’s far too legitimate an excuse for much of our region, but as I write to you courtesy of our working wi-fi made possible as a result of the power I haven’t lost, fresh from a warm shower made possible by same, in a house thankfully stocked full of enough food bought last weekend from various inter-city grocery runs that it almost looks like we’d prepared for this moment, well…

If you’d like to help those who’ll be recovering, here’s a link to a couple of Mutual Aid organizations out of North Carolina:

https://www.rjcavl.org/mutual-aid-resources/

Appalachian Funder's Network

https://bit.ly/appheleneresponsefund

Beloved Asheville (Asheville, NC)

https://belovedasheville.com/get-involved

World Central Kitchen

https://wck.org/search/tag/north-carolina

Operation Airdrop (Concord, NC)

Hurricane Helene Relief Efforts at

https://www.operation-airdrop.com/hurricane-helene

If you hear of any other worthwhile relief organizations helping those in need, please let me know in the comments, or by message, and I’ll add them here.