Evacuations and Memory Hoarding

My phone has been uploading photos to Google Photos for three days now. They were uploading to iCloud for two days before that until I realized that while iCloud is synced, any picture I delete from my phone also disappears from the cloud. (Upon discovering this, I frantically recovered 30 videos from my deleted folder.) Over 9,000 items I’m uploading—400 of them videos. I’ve deleted nearly every app and all my music, but I can’t bring myself to delete even one picture (or text) until it’s safe elsewhere. I would just put them on my computer, but my computer doesn’t have storage space either, and my external hard drive is too full for me to back it up and make more room. So here we are. My phone is too full to even receive emails. Because I don’t understand how technology works, I imagine the emails waiting patiently in a traffic jam for their turn to get through the road work. 

momentos from freshman fall 

You see, I’m a hoarder. Not the kind you see on TV who has decade-old rat carcasses scattered under the floor-to-ceiling trash in my house, but the kind who absolutely still has that ticket from that theater performance you went to together during freshman year of college. It will be in one of several dozen boxes of similar paraphernalia that is certainly, indisputably, definitively NOT trash, even though neither of you could explain the plot now. It’s a matter of sentimental principle. 
I’m a hoarder of memories. 

When I was little, my friends and I played these semi-morbid mental exercise games of hypothetical truths. Who would you save first in a fire? What would you grab first if you could only grab one object? What would you pack if you only had 5 minutes to leave? 

Though I’ve lived in prime hurricane territory for two thirds of my life, I’ve only evacuated for 4 storms. First was Georges when I was 8. I remember that my family stopped for the night at some nondescript hotel in Tuscaloosa, and I was enraptured by the baby bat hanging on the side of the walkway. I don’t remember packing anything, or if it even occurred to me to consider what to pack. Then there was the storm in early high school (which Google tells me must have been Ivan). We stayed in a church shelter in Florence. I don’t remember being worried. The storms themselves were uneventful, almost hypothetical. Another mental exercise. What if this were real? What if this weren’t a precaution? 

And then there was Katrina. Packing felt different. Should I bring all my valuables, or just put them on the bed away from the windows? Should we bring Moses (our pet bird) with us or just put him in the back hallway away from any windows with enough food for a few days. We’ll be back tomorrow, after all. 

Journals from my 4 years in college--the others are in a separate box

We were heading toward Monroe in northwest Louisiana, but we never made it. The traffic was bumper to bumper until we finally stopped to sleep in the gym of a church just across the Mississppi river from Natchez. I stood with my mom in the nearest Wal-mart entertainment center for half the night watching the identical images flash across tv screens of all sizes. We watched as the Mississippi Coast was eradicated. We watched until we understood there was nothing left and the flood waters started pouring into the homes of the evacuees standing next to us. We were lucky—72 trees down in our yard, but our house was untouched (Moses was fine and singing in the dark). But there was a collective feeling that began in that Wal-mart that our lives would never be quite the same again. 

And then just a few weeks ago was Barry. No one ever knows what to do with a storm like Barry. Barry—the name of someone’s jovial uncle. Or the elderly neighbor who rescues stray dogs and bakes delicious cookies. Barry is surely harmless. But then there were the floods earlier that week, not even related to Barry, but unpredicted and ominous. I left my house for work that morning and spent the next 4 hours stuck in my car on the street car tracks trying to escape the flood waters. One of my friends drove through the flood to his apartment where he grabbed a go-bag and headed straight for the airport—all of 5 minutes thought and preparation, no hesitation. One friend left promptly the next morning, and another left that night. I hadn’t intended to leave. My landlord assured me that my house has never flooded. But the Mississippi River was so high… what if? 

Nothing would happen, I reminded myself as I bought Tupperware containers two days before the storm. This house won’t flood, I told myself as I piled all the books from my lowest two shelves on the kitchen table, and then decided to put my favorites in a laundry basket and move them onto the counter instead. The most important things should go in the Tupperware because it’s waterproof and can float. How do you decide what’s irreplaceable? I packed the paintings I made in high school art class. The art Sam made for me to hang on my walls in college. I packed the poems Elijah gave me two birthdays ago. The framed photo of my sister and I on her wedding day. Lily’s painted baby-foot prints. My great grandfather’s ring. The dried flowers from my grandpa’s grave. I moved the container from the table to the counter. Then from the counter to the top of the refrigerator. 

How do we choose the objects that deserve our sentiment? Why do we give emotional power to things that exist only as symbols? Would I rather be the person who could rush home, grab Harry and a change of clothes, and leave without thinking twice? 

During the years I did gymnastics, my parents sacrificed every cent they possessed so my sister and I could do the things we loved (to a degree that I couldn’t fully understand at the time). We didn’t have extra money for a video camera, so almost no videos (and very few photos) exist of my gymnastics years. My friends’ parents would video me at competitions with the intention of making a DVD copy to give my mom and I eventually. I don’t know of a single one of those DVDs or recordings that survived Katrina. There used to be professional sports photographers who photographed competitions and then put action shots online for families to buy. My family didn’t even have a computer for most of those years, and once we did, we didn’t have money to splurge, so we never bought them. Last year, I secretly contacted about a dozen Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Tennessee sports photographers to see if any of them had photos archived from 15 years ago. No luck. And why does it matter? They were just videos, just pictures. They were worth nothing compared to the lived experience. Why over 15 years later do I still think about them?

My parents took a lot of photos of Whitney and I when we were babies. Money was tighter once I was born, so even though they took as many photos of me, they didn’t get them developed. For my entire life, we’ve made jokes about how I was the invisible child. There are albums of Whitney from before I was born, and then albums where I appear suddenly as an elementary school child. There was essentially no evidence I existed before the age of 6. A couple of years ago for Christmas, my mom gave me a framed photo that I’d never seen before—me on my first birthday. Then she gave me a bag full of pictures. She'd found almost a dozen rolls of film hidden away in storage. The film was between 25 and 30 years old, and she knew there was no hope it wasn't ruined when she snuck it to Walgreens to be developed. She cried in the store when she got them back and found nothing had been ruined—all of my baby pictures for the first time anyone had seen them in nearly 30 years. It’s one of the best gifts I’ve ever been given. 

Of course Barry was harmless. There was hardly a puddle in the road when I returned back to my house after evacuating to my parents for the weekend. Before I left for Mississippi, after I’d packed up Harry and some snacks and my cameras, I went back in to grab the laundry basket of my favorite books. I got back in my car and put it in drive, stopped, went back inside, and climbed up on a chair to get the Tupperware container, too.