It is sort of like a headache.  It is really, really bad and you really cannot stand it anymore.  Then it sort of goes away.  But, you are still you and we are constituted to forget pain.

While the waters are receding from the latest storm, IKE, you and I who are beyond its embrace are unlike those with the headaches caused by him.  This headache will last and last and really will never go away.  Just looking at the pictures of the extent of this storm that ravaged an already soaked part of America causes us to whimper the “It can’t happen here”.  Can it?  It surely can and has happened before and will happen again.  I don’t know how to prevent headaches nor do I know how to prevent storms, hurricanes and tornadoes from visiting us periodically.  There is no system to them, but they come at us during the supposedly summer holiday season when frolicking in the ocean and pools makes us wish for more water.  One should be careful for what one wishes for.

I have this need to put things in proper niches so that I will be able sometimes in the future to go and pull them out just like they were when put in that hiding place.  Unfortunately, I usually forget where that hiding place is and turn the house up-side-down and never really find what I was looking for.  You get side-tracked by finding other things that you have to read through and through bringing you back to an earlier time when something happened to make you sad or glad.  You can caught up in these encounters and forget the pain of not being able to find what you were looking for in the first place.

Getting soaked and having your house blow away is a lot different.  Having to wade through water on what used to be streets and knowing that all the wreckage around you is now just garbage is too much to bear. You will have lost all that you possess and have no where to go.  While those waters recede you will have nothing left except your life which will not be the same anymore.

We can take an aspirin for our headache.  There is no pill for IKE and others like him.  You can wake from the ache in your head and feel pretty good but you cannot wake up from Ike or earlier versions like Katrina and shift a few things here and there and everything will be the way it was.  It doesn’t work that way.

For those of us who were not touched by the ravages of terrible storms in some physical way, we must have been hurt by the hurt done to others.  You cannot close your eyes and pretend that such misery will go as the waters recede.