A few years ago, I stayed up all night and watched a man stand outside of a closed high school. He hadn’t slept for at least 24 hours and was subjecting himself to heavy rains and winds blowing at over 120 miles per hour. I was sharing this night with him, me parked safely in my bed over 1,500 miles away, because I was terrified that Hurricane Rita was going to flatten my childhood home, the home built by my father, who would come home after work every day to our rental house which was by luck and the grace of G-d one street away and go over there to help the contractors build. He helped pour the foundation, he helped erect the first wall and every wall that followed, he nailed shingles to the roof. That house was the culmination of a life-long dream for him, along with having and raising a good family. That was in 1976.

My father died in 1999. The house was destroyed in 2008.

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On September 13, Hurricane Ike made landfall and pushed inland a massive swell of warm, Gulf Coast water which surged up a seaward lake and into the small town where I was raised. It crept rapidly up the old familiar streets, streets where I learned to drive, streets where my cousin and best friend discovered that if he bounced in the driver seat of his father’s old beat up truck, it would for some reason honk, past the house of the girl I had such a fierce crush on all throughout school, past the house where my cousins lived, past the city bank, the old gas station, the new gas station, my elementary school, across my father’s grave and the grave of that cousin and best friend who died stupidly when he was 18… all along those old roads and places and finally up to the doorstep of the house that my father built.

I slept through it this time. Perhaps I just didn’t have it in me to wait up all night, heart in throat, pulse in hand, to see what happened. Perhaps it was because I already knew that this time that there was no hope. But, still, I had hope anyway. I woke up the following morning thinking that maybe a miracle had occured, that somehow the waters had avoided the house that my father built.

In the early hours that day, the reports were few and far between and I kept hope. When the news began to bubble up toward us, none of it was good. There was a recording of a woman who called in to a local news station. She and her husband had been rescued by neighbors and they were trapped on the second floor of that neighbor’s house. The water was standing about four feet there. They lived just three streets away from the house that my father built.

I had watched hurricanes come and go from inside that house all of my life. I’ve seen flooding so fierce that the street was no longer visible and most of the yard had been covered. All that was left was just some grass peeking up here and there over the gray waters: the tips of thousands of narrow green fingers. We’d go and splash around when the rains had eased up enough.

This time, however, was dreadfully different. This time, I imagined the water creeping up in the dark, a wide wet thief. It must have been like a black and angry surface, spilling up and over the step at the front door, a foot above the yard. At that point, it must have already found easy entrance into the garage, spilling beneath and around the garage doors, re-arranging the boxes inside that had accumulated since my father’s death, boxes of unnecessary detritus from a life that did not seem to belong to our family, long left undisturbed by my mother’s lonely melancholy and increasing bleak stasis. She had plans to deal with them, to give them away to Goodwill, to do something with them. But they, like so much stuff, had remained undisturbed, always the target of some plan that was going to be launched tomorrow, or the next day, or the following week. Every year that I visited, it had become increasingly clear to me that time had ceased to move forward there, in the house that my father built.

Eventually, the water began pressing against the doors and eventually through, finding its way onto 40-year-old linoleum where the bare feet of a four-year-old me had ran around endlessly. Where cats had jumped, run, and collapsed exhausted; where my sister walked, where my mother walked, where my father walked; where I had, without any prompting from my parents, bid farewell to my imaginary friend, who always came in and out of my days through the pantry door (a child-sized Larry Fine who showed up one day wearing a traveling suit and carrying a single piece of plain luggage, telling me that it was time for him to go, that he had other kids to go keep company); where we ate dinners and played games together: The Game of Life, Monopoly, Stop Thief, and Trivial Pursuit; where my mother had taught me to play backgammon and my father had taught me to play chess; where old family friends had wandered in on the dark and directionless nights of my single-digit youth with guitars and songs; across the carpet in the living room where sometimes when my father was working the graveyard shift, my mother, sister, and I pulled mattresses from the beds and cushions from the sofas and pretended to be camping, huddled around the small black-and-white television lifted from my sister’s room; overcoming the desk containing the financial journals my mother had started when she and my father were first married, containing every paycheck and every bill they had paid over the course of their lives together, committed dutifully in blue ink in my mother’s impeccable and classic handwriting; where dozens of Christmases had transpired, where I received a Millennium Falcon toy that seemed larger than life, where my mother one year received a pistol from my father (a feat he pulled off without telling anyone); where my father had stood over me, his face so red with anger over a $1,000 telephone bill racked up over two months when I had become addicted to downloading pirated Commodore 64 software from bulletin boards across the US on my 9600 baud modem; senselessly across all of those memories as if it could somehow wipe them away.

The water kissed the furniture where my mother and father sat and watched television; the sofa where my father would sleep when his back was hurting him; the bed in my parents’ room where I spent so much of my time in a daze when I had chicken pox, watching Fraggle Rock while suffering from tunnel vision. It went into everything, into every room. It filled the house up and with great strength pushed he refrigerator out of position, threw the door open and deposited a dozen uneaten chicken dinners my mother in her disintegration refused to eat and refused to throw away. Later, my sister would report an astonishing colony of mold had taken over much of the kitchen, launched from the water and the rotting food; the Southern summer heat that had followed Ike incubated them in their mystical, fuzzy ambitions. The house that my father built, the house in which I grew up, where we were a family in all of our beautiful and infernal struggles, every pristine failure and tarnished victory, had been destroyed.

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My sister called me today to inform me that the insurance company had decided to give us the maximum value allowed by my mother’s policy. The amount is far more than we had anticipated and is far more than the repairs will cost. My mother will never return to that house so we will either sell it or rent it. Either way, my mother wants all of the money to be split between my sister and I. It’s not enough to make my family, my wife and I, and our future daughter, rich but it’s enough to set us up to where we won’t have to worry about money anymore; where, as long as we invest smartly and I keep working, our debts will be erased and our financial worries, barring some catastrophe, will be, at least as briefly as I am able to see, assuaged. So many of our worries, the worries that plague so many middle-class families, were evaporating. We would be far from rich but we would have enough money in savings and enough money invested that we will be able to raise our family in comfort: no more living paycheck-to-paycheck, no more worrying about contracts ending suddenly and leaving us having to rely on credit cards to survive. We will feel safe.

In the conversation with my sister, though, she mentioned that she would have to go and get photographs of the house, that it was surreal with everything removed, with only the skeleton of the inner walls remaining. I had no idea that they had started work on the house. For some reason, I figured it was still in its post-flooded state, mold on the grow, chicken dinners on the rot, furniture out of joint. I guess it’s because, after Rita, my mother sailed that house with the blue FEMA tarp for months. I figured it’d take equally long to get anyone in to help this time. Somehow I found that ruined stasis comforting.

My sister told me that the beam over the door to my childhood room still had my name written on it in my father’s handwriting. The sudden vision of my father’s house as nothing more than a gutted skeleton, the linoleum he helped lay, the carpet he had helped put down, the house where we had baked cinnamon rolls, where we had watched the Love Boat followed by Fantasy Island, the house where my father had rigged up the best surround sound system around a big screen TV that the technology of the time could allow… it was too much to bear. The money I would make from the tragedy, the money that would give my wife and I the means to buy a house in which we could raise our daughter, all of our children, who my father will never have the pleasure of meeting, suddenly seemed trivial, stupid, and worthless. Every memory, good and bad, of my youth suddenly rushed up to me, my own dark and relentless flood, and overwhelmed me. It was a drowning I was willing to suffer; I wanted to die in it’s nostalgic black and green mirth.

My father, of course, would have been sympathetic. The house is just a house. Its condition (or our ownership of it) does nothing to disturb or detriment the memories that occurred within it. It was just a shell, a lifeless container; it was us who gave it life every day that we lived there. From my youth spent on a fat blue bean bag to the day I first saw my father cry in the moments before we went to the funeral of my cousin and best friend who died in 1991. It wasn’t the house that gave us all that we had, it was us who gave the house what we had. And now that we’re gone from that place, regardless of the times I spent picking up long spines of unspent staples during its construction while my sister was writing her name on every upright of that house’s skeleton, to my mother and all of her unbelievable strength in dealing with us in all the years after… well, there are not enough flood waters in the world to wash that away from us.

I will probably never set foot in that house again. All of the belongings that I had left there, with plans to ship them up, are now forever lost, essentially washed out to sea. I have the things that are most important to me, though: I have my father’s guitar which he had given me and I have carried carefully with me all across this country, I have a bunch of photos of my father and my mother when they were young, including a hand-tinted photo of my father in his Air Force uniform, and I have my baby book that my mother wrote in, noting that I have a fascination with keys and rain, and I have the dark blue photo album with pictures of me in my infancy and youth, including a picture of my great grandmother holding me. My sister has rescued from the house the hundreds of slides my father had taken when he traveled the world in the Air Force and I hope she was able to get his duffel, too. And I’m quite certain she grabbed his shoe shine kit from the same shelf where the slides were safe from the flood waters. It, along with the guitar, are the two physical items which best represent my father’s legacy and bring out the most nostalgia from us.

For some reason, hearing that the house was already in the midst of being reborn into a place that shared the shape and geography of my youth but was now built of different things was just… well, I don’t know. It was unexpected. It is a good thing that the flood will vouchsafe the future of my family and will set my sister up (and her care of my mother who now lives with her) well. The price I feel like I am paying doesn’t actually exist. It’s just hard to let go of these inverse ghosts, to know that the place where you spent twenty years of your life was no longer that place… I don’t know. I don’t have much more of a conclusion to offer than that. I try not to be attached to things but sometimes it’s hard to overcome a lifetime’s practice as a kind of fretful barnacle tenaciously attached to the ship through which your youth sailed, your father at the helm, and all stars in alignment with him.

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For some reason, this was probably the most difficult entry I’ve ever had to write; I cried through most of it.