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- Jan 18, 2009
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- Location
- Greenfield, Tennessee 38230
I learned to give not because I have much ... but because I know exactly what it's like to have little or nothing.
Fifteen years ago today, I met a wicked lady named Katrina. I'd only lived 25 miles west of New Orleans for a little over two years (after relocating from southern California in 2003) so I had downsized quite a bit to bare essentials.
I wasn't one of those you saw on tv stranded by flooding. Two tornadoes in ten minutes lifted the elevated house first like popping a sheet, and then lifted 60-pound sheets of antique roof tin like opening cans of cat food, one after the next ... until half of the roof on Billy's house -- built before 1865 -- was gone.
We heard the classic "train horn," crashes, **** blowing up (transformers?), stuff pelleting the house ... after riding out a couple decent earthquakes out west, it was a unique experience.
The only direct view was a small section of window on the kitchen door that was so only because that's where we ran out of plywood the week before. The carnage was like an old horror movie as a result, heard but never seen.
Nine inches of rain followed over the next 14 hours.
I watched him use a 3/8" bit on a battery drill to put holes in his precious hardwood floors to let the water out.
At daybreak he says, "Let's go see your car." Stationed in a 3-sided metal building with only an old U-haul kind of truck parked in front of it earlier for advance protection, I was petrified.
Wrestling through downed trees and branches, remnants of a portable carport, the neighbor's above ground pool, etc., I get to the building and see it.
[It's been 15 #$@!& years Leanna. Why are you crying?]
Slimer is totally filthy with untraceable mud and covered in wet leaves but completely unhurt. All the pent up emotion from braving my first hurricane all erupted at once.
Now a wreck on two feet, I step back from the little space between the truck and the building so Billy can get by me when I see it. One of those 6'x4' 60 pound sheets of roof tin had fully wrapped itself around the heavy I-beam building support. My car would have been mangled if it had flown a few inches more west.
The wind was still blowing so hard later that day that I had to actually tie myself to the chimney with a rope to help tarp it. (5'0 and 115 lbs since grade school ... now ya see why there's 8" shoes in my pics lol.)
The power came back on 8 days later.
I called work, a law firm in nearby Metairie, and learned it had suffered so much damage they were relocating 75 miles away to Baton Rouge! My daily driver had gotten crushed by tin on the front so badly the fender was embedded in the tire and by a smaller tree on the hatch. I couldn't drive anywhere and wasn't turning my Cuda into a commuter.
Billy notified his insurance companies. State Farm settled the Mustang GT 5.0 in a parking lot the next week. We had moved in with his parents, hopeful it would be temporary.
AIG told him not to touch ANYTHING and would send an adjuster. We could have saved so much if we had known then it wasn't going to happen for 96 DAYS. It was a freakin' science experiment within a few days, and three months later had mold a foot thick. All we had left is what we grabbed when we moved in with his folks, precious little.
I got fired by mail the day before my 40th birthday, September 11, 2005. "Job Abandonment" they called it.
Meanwhile, totally unknown to me, my friend Dana Price (mentioned earlier in Ed's posts) was rallying the members of the Yahoo-based '67-'69 Barracuda Owners Group on my behalf. Two big bottles of Hershey's Syrup arrived in the mail along with an old textbook. Tucked in its pages was $1580!!! It absolutely got us through when other agencies failed so miserably.
In February the settlement checks started coming in. Billy had his house torn down March 11, 2006. It had a third fireplace we never knew about.
We found this place on LandAndFarm.com, found a home inspector to look at it, signed the papers in May and finally got here in September.
What a $hithole town turned out to be. I discovered I could spend four hours a day in the car resuming my paralegal career in Memphis or Nashville since local lawyers were few and happy to pay a girl $6 an hour to answer the phone. Billy discovered he couldn't bring his reputation for engine building and tuning 500 miles and expect a farm community to keep him busy.
On May 31, 2006, I opened my little shop behind our house and, in the fourteen years since, have turned a fun hobby I found back in 1999 while restoring my car into a globally recognized metal restoration and custom powder coating business. It is successful now ONLY because of all of you who keep me busy every day, show off my work to your friends and colleagues, and have such glorious feedback that I have NEVER ONCE formally advertised anywhere or had a single day without something to do. It's Phoenix Specialty Coatings because I have been rising from the ashes of devastation and completely rebuilt my life around something other than money. It's not nearly as lucrative as lawyering but the personal satisfaction of bringing new life to your metal is off the charts. I'm livin' the dream here!
So now you know my story too, and why I eagerly rallied my own colleagues and friends on FABO and now here on FBBO to Pay It Forward. I hope this isn't the last time one of our own calls to us silently or through Higher Forces (as the case here) because we all benefitted from it, from learning what we can accomplish together through unity, and what we learned about each other in making it happen.
This is one of FBBO's Greatest Moments.
Fifteen years ago today, I met a wicked lady named Katrina. I'd only lived 25 miles west of New Orleans for a little over two years (after relocating from southern California in 2003) so I had downsized quite a bit to bare essentials.
I wasn't one of those you saw on tv stranded by flooding. Two tornadoes in ten minutes lifted the elevated house first like popping a sheet, and then lifted 60-pound sheets of antique roof tin like opening cans of cat food, one after the next ... until half of the roof on Billy's house -- built before 1865 -- was gone.
We heard the classic "train horn," crashes, **** blowing up (transformers?), stuff pelleting the house ... after riding out a couple decent earthquakes out west, it was a unique experience.
The only direct view was a small section of window on the kitchen door that was so only because that's where we ran out of plywood the week before. The carnage was like an old horror movie as a result, heard but never seen.
Nine inches of rain followed over the next 14 hours.
I watched him use a 3/8" bit on a battery drill to put holes in his precious hardwood floors to let the water out.
At daybreak he says, "Let's go see your car." Stationed in a 3-sided metal building with only an old U-haul kind of truck parked in front of it earlier for advance protection, I was petrified.
Wrestling through downed trees and branches, remnants of a portable carport, the neighbor's above ground pool, etc., I get to the building and see it.
[It's been 15 #$@!& years Leanna. Why are you crying?]
Slimer is totally filthy with untraceable mud and covered in wet leaves but completely unhurt. All the pent up emotion from braving my first hurricane all erupted at once.
Now a wreck on two feet, I step back from the little space between the truck and the building so Billy can get by me when I see it. One of those 6'x4' 60 pound sheets of roof tin had fully wrapped itself around the heavy I-beam building support. My car would have been mangled if it had flown a few inches more west.
The wind was still blowing so hard later that day that I had to actually tie myself to the chimney with a rope to help tarp it. (5'0 and 115 lbs since grade school ... now ya see why there's 8" shoes in my pics lol.)
The power came back on 8 days later.
I called work, a law firm in nearby Metairie, and learned it had suffered so much damage they were relocating 75 miles away to Baton Rouge! My daily driver had gotten crushed by tin on the front so badly the fender was embedded in the tire and by a smaller tree on the hatch. I couldn't drive anywhere and wasn't turning my Cuda into a commuter.
Billy notified his insurance companies. State Farm settled the Mustang GT 5.0 in a parking lot the next week. We had moved in with his parents, hopeful it would be temporary.
AIG told him not to touch ANYTHING and would send an adjuster. We could have saved so much if we had known then it wasn't going to happen for 96 DAYS. It was a freakin' science experiment within a few days, and three months later had mold a foot thick. All we had left is what we grabbed when we moved in with his folks, precious little.
I got fired by mail the day before my 40th birthday, September 11, 2005. "Job Abandonment" they called it.
Meanwhile, totally unknown to me, my friend Dana Price (mentioned earlier in Ed's posts) was rallying the members of the Yahoo-based '67-'69 Barracuda Owners Group on my behalf. Two big bottles of Hershey's Syrup arrived in the mail along with an old textbook. Tucked in its pages was $1580!!! It absolutely got us through when other agencies failed so miserably.
In February the settlement checks started coming in. Billy had his house torn down March 11, 2006. It had a third fireplace we never knew about.
We found this place on LandAndFarm.com, found a home inspector to look at it, signed the papers in May and finally got here in September.
What a $hithole town turned out to be. I discovered I could spend four hours a day in the car resuming my paralegal career in Memphis or Nashville since local lawyers were few and happy to pay a girl $6 an hour to answer the phone. Billy discovered he couldn't bring his reputation for engine building and tuning 500 miles and expect a farm community to keep him busy.
On May 31, 2006, I opened my little shop behind our house and, in the fourteen years since, have turned a fun hobby I found back in 1999 while restoring my car into a globally recognized metal restoration and custom powder coating business. It is successful now ONLY because of all of you who keep me busy every day, show off my work to your friends and colleagues, and have such glorious feedback that I have NEVER ONCE formally advertised anywhere or had a single day without something to do. It's Phoenix Specialty Coatings because I have been rising from the ashes of devastation and completely rebuilt my life around something other than money. It's not nearly as lucrative as lawyering but the personal satisfaction of bringing new life to your metal is off the charts. I'm livin' the dream here!
So now you know my story too, and why I eagerly rallied my own colleagues and friends on FABO and now here on FBBO to Pay It Forward. I hope this isn't the last time one of our own calls to us silently or through Higher Forces (as the case here) because we all benefitted from it, from learning what we can accomplish together through unity, and what we learned about each other in making it happen.
This is one of FBBO's Greatest Moments.
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