It smelled like it did twenty-three years ago—stagnant moisture combined with diluted soil and grass. The familiar scent enveloped me like a tiny cloud as I knelt in Mom’s closet, using a chalky razor blade to slice across a seam in the Sheetrock. It was the same joint my dad cut through when I was seven, and I can still picture him pulling back the crumbling fragments of wall with a hammer and crowbar.
This is the second time my childhood home has flooded. The first in 1994; the second by the recent Hurricane Harvey. The house still bears the physical marks of one trauma, even as we are cleaning up from another. Continue Reading…
