"One day of Bad Weather"

"It's crazy that one day of bad weather, very bad weather, caused all this"

This was said to me today after spending time driving around checking on different properties in our community. This was in response to the number of sights we saw, including:

Empty slabs where homes once stood, many with tile flooring still in place where kitchens and bathrooms once were. Places where families sat around their kitchen tables and discussed the happenings of their day and shared meals together.

We passed a gas station still boarded up. Though it had been gutted after the storm the business never move back in. I imagine before the storm neighborhood children frequented the store for candy bars and cokes and adults passed through and spoke to familiar faces.

Still many houses line the streets abandoned by the families that once occupied them, for one reason or another, but non the less unoccupied, unfinished, and weathered by the storm and 6 years of neglect.

An entire shopping center sits abandoned, looking worse as each year passes. Next to it a bank sits on the corner of a heavily traveled intersection waiting for something to happen, but will remain an eye sore until then.

Trees stripped bare of all their leaves and branches, some twisted off at the top, some uprooted, and all exposed to salt water, which killed many of the trees from the large magnificent oaks, the tall pines, and the flowering magnolias.

All of this caused by one storm, one day.

I don't believe the enormity of the storm will ever entirely sink in, but some days things hit me a little harder. Today was one of those days.