I talked to my mom this morning, and she said that all of our Mississippi relatives are accounted for. One family lost their house and is staying with other relatives, and one of my great aunts fell and broke her hip, and is in the hospital. Other than that, everyone is fine.
I have a lot of family in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. Fortunately, my closest relatives — my mother, father, step-father, grandmother, plus some aunts, uncles, and first cousins — were not in the most heavily affected areas. Granny was visiting one of my aunts in New York. Her flight home was canceled twice, so she returned on Wednesday instead of Monday, but at least she has a home to return to. My mom rode things out at her house in Fairhope, with not much worse than power outages and downed tree limbs. [...]
Weathering the storms
We had a batch of bad weather come through here yesterday. I had seen a severe thunderstorm warning earlier in the day, but didn’t think much about it. But early in the evening, as we were preparing dinner, the warning sirens started going off, so we turned on the local news to get a more detailed status. It turned out that we were under a tonado warning, and the worst patch of it was heading straight towards our area.
We gathered up the kids and sat in our hallway. [...]