I believe it is something we all hear if we live in a certain area that gets slammed occasionally by Mother Nature.
Those of us who live in the Deep South have to contend with hurricanes. Those pesky named storms that swirl around like a spinning bowling ball headed for the shore. They push walls of water inland and drop buckets of rain. They spin off tornadoes and split off trees. We get sandwiched between falling water and rising water. And we have to clean up yet another mess.
This season was a big one ending in quite a finale. When I was recently traveling in north Missouri a lady asked me where I was from. When I told her southeast Louisiana, she asked me how did I fare in the storms? And the usual well-rehearsed information was spun off.
"We only got the Category 2 storm this time. The next two storms were much worse and turned into Florida. They got some flooding and power outages. We just had to clean up our yards. We were lucky."
It is so common for those of us living in these areas that I often forget how big of an ordeal it sounds like when retelling the event.
And then the lady went on to say her mother asked her why people down there stay and rebuild. She wondered why we chose to live in areas that experience hurricanes. But then she answered her own question, saying she would not live further north where they experience blizzards. And after a friend who had lived up north for some time explained to me how they had to add some type of salt to their water tanks in order to keep the water from tearing up their skin, my first thought was "why do they live up there?"
When the massive fires break out in the west and people are on the news losing yet another home, we shake our heads and shrug our shoulders. Why? When an earthquake hits in an area that often experiences them we think to ourselves, "I would never live there!" And yet people do because the other 364 days out of the year they are not experiencing an earthquake.
Every place has its own problems to contend with when facing the forces of nature. Be it drought or flood, it is something to deal with or overcome. The desert was beautiful to see but lacked enough green for me beyond a one week visit. The cities are magical with a melting pot of cultures, but they are loud and busy and not enough open spaces. The north has an amazing display of fall colors and summer blooms, but brings an assurance of cabin fever come the dead of winter.
And in the south, we have hurricanes. And depending on how close you live to the Gulf or eastern coastline, at some point in your lifetime there is a chance you may have to rebuild.
I have often thought back to the early settler days when men, women and children would pile into a horse drawn wagon and head out into the open spaces of the unknown. They would face harsh weather conditions, native tribes, overgrown forests, dried up rivers, and more --- but yet they pushed on westward. Why? Why not remain where those people before had already cleared the way to an easier life? I don't believe there is an answer to that question.
Why do people choose to live on the ocean where storms may crash their shores? Why do we live in the south where hurricanes become personified and take on a part of our lives?
Because for some reason the south has become a home. The good, the bad, and the ugly. We say, “Hurricane season is coming so we need to start eating out of the freezer." And we think about how poor those guys have it living up north.
