So like usual, here goes nothing.
I wanted to get down to the house as soon as we got out of bed that morning, but Jason thought that it was still under water and that we should wait just a little longer. When we did get down there, the water was still covering our street and driveway. Every few hours, you would get another foot of your front yard or driveway to unload stuff from your home into.
I, in total Tiffany nature, had the video camera and the still camera both going as we cracked open the door.
You couldn't see the hardwood floors at all, there was just this dark, thick, murky substance on everything. There are still may items in my home still with this residue almost four years later. We affectionately call it "flood mud".
The refrigerator was on top of the kitchen table. A pair of my shoes from the closet was at the front door. Tupperware was in every room. Drywall was sagging off the walls. The TV had a water line across the top of the screen. The butcher block still stood strong in the middle of the living room with my couch on top and the rug on top of that, all three of those pieces are still part of my homes décor today, just not on top of each other.
The things that we had "put on higher ground" had all been knocked over or drowned completely. My nightstand was upside down. My mattress still carried half the river in it.
I have never been at such a loss on where to begin with anything in my life. Jason strapped down and got moving faster than I could absorb what I was seeing.
Our neighborhood was still blocked off from the rest of the world, so no family was getting to us anytime soon. But that didn't mean we were alone. People just started coming from everywhere. They were asking what they needed to do, could they not tell that I had no idea! I started a trail of kids helping me to unload every article of clothing that we owned from our dressers and our closet and dump them in the bed of Jason's truck. It was something. Didn't really know what else to do. Jason had men that came by helping him lift furniture out.
My dining room set, that I had paid the last installment payment on only weeks earlier, crumbled to the ground as soon as it was sat in the front yard. My great grandmother's antique couch was in pieces. Its still hard for me to grasp what all we lost that day. I will find myself in the kitchen knowing that I own a pizza cutter, when I all of a sudden realize that I did, but that was pre-flood and post-flood I hadn't repurchased that. The little things like that are always weird. The first grocery store trip was the weirdest. I had never shopped for everything before. There are just staples that every kitchen has. Your salt and pepper shakers travel from home to home as you move with you, but when they are gone and you realize that you don't even have a salt shaker, it is a weird feeling.
From here, I don't remember the amount of time before I saw my parents or my in-laws walk through that door. I don't remember their reactions to what they saw. This is where I get foggy. The next few days and weeks were a lot of deconstruction of my home.
We had built our home only 2 years prior, so everything in it had been new and not ready for a remodel, but it was getting one.
I remember that first night, as Jason crawled under our house to remove the wet insulation, sitting in our picture window upstairs with a shotgun, so scared that without doors, people would just start breaking into our homes trying to find anything that was left. We were very blessed that I never once heard of such a thing happening during that time, but that first night, I wasn't sure of anything. I was a basket case.
Once the drywall came down and you could just see the shell of our house, it was surreal, because a chandelier may still be hanging in the middle of the room with a wall sconce, but no drywall below the sconce or floor below the chandelier.
Within days we had our own port-a-jon in the front yard, thanks to my uncle who understood that a pregnant woman without a bathroom was a bad idea. We set up a make shift kitchen on the back porch and put up plastic and 2x4's on the upstairs bannister so that we could sleep in the house for the days to come.
People were coming by to check on us, many leaving with a bucket of clothes from the back of Jason's truck to wash for me. I think half of Nashville has literally seen my dirty laundry. I had a permanent seat on the front porch where I barked out a lot of directions, because there really isn't much demolition or bleach cleaning that a pregnant person can do and with the state of my pregnancy, no one was taking any chances.
The piles in front of our homes made the streets look like something out of a movie. Everyone's belongings just packed high waiting for the trash truck, which took weeks to come because of the amount of trash being collected. Here is a picture of me (and Will) and our trash pile.
That looks fairly mild to how big the stack really was.
That is almost what I looked like, only worse the morning that the USA Today made its way down our street. It was quiet when they came down. Most volunteers hadn't made it back for another day yet, and I stood in my pj's outside my port-a-jon and thought, this can't really be happening....the world news is going to show a Tennessee hick pregnant at a port-a-jon in her front yard. This is not how I every planned on making the first page of a national newspaper....luckily I convinced them to take the picture inside in what use to be my bathroom. Here is a link to the article that they ran:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20100506/1aflood06_cv.art.htm
It's funny, but as I type this tonight, I went back to re-read the USA Today article, and 3 days after the flood, I didn't even know those other people in the article, today they are part of my "flood family" and I know them oh so well. You really don't know your neighbors until you have no walls and every possession is on the front lawn on display. That is a chance to really get to know some people. I hope that you don't have to get to know yours under such an extreme circumstance.
Maybe the bulk of those days is so foggy because I was being banished to my chair so often, but I will never forget the 100's of people that just kept showing up at our house. The things that people were taking care of for me, it really was a picture of humanity and thoughtfulness that most people don't get the opportunity to see everyday.
Guess how I said in an earlier entry that Jason and I wanted to shut off from the world and make it go away, there was a big lesson here for us in just how we didn't need to proceed through these upcoming months alone and how blessed we were to have so many people to rely on in our lives. Many people were showing up not knowing we were expecting or having no idea about the diagnosis we had just received two months earlier. The love we were shown is truly remarkable and unforgettable. If the days go gray and I can't remember how long it took to take the floors out of the house, I will never forget the feelings of love.
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