Swept Out To Sea

You may remember that we were planning to buy a beach house (with another couple) that we could rent out and use ourselves when it was empty. I haven't written an update because my heart is broken. It looks like it's not going to happen.

Here are some photos I took in August of one of our favorite houses:

A lovely woman owns this house and filled it with photos of her kids and grand kids enjoying the beach throughout the years. She was sad about selling the house. Sweet.

Her house is down there somewhere in the wake of Hurricane Ike:

I contacted our real estate agent just to check in and make sure he was OK, but all I got in return was a short e-mail telling me their office is closed until further notice. And as far as I know, officials aren't letting anyone except residents on the island.

So I don't even know if that house is still standing. I don't know if the owner is OK. We've heard terrible stories about people who chose to ride out the hurricane and were last heard from on their cell phones, saying that the water was rising and the roads were impassible.

Another area we looked at:

We drove up and down the streets, parked the car and took a look at the beach.

Outside one adorable little house, I said to Greg, "Let's make an offer right now!" I wasn't completely serious and in the end, we wound up crossing this area off the list because (as you can see in the above photo) the beach itself was kind of small. But here's that area now:



Yeah, it's that famous photo of the one house left standing. That's the main road we drove down as we looked for street signs, trying to locate specific houses.

I'm sad for me, of course, but it pales in comparison to how I feel for those people on Bolivar Peninsula. I think about the people we met on our little jaunts down there- the smiling women at the real estate office, the friendly home owners, the waitresses who served our food- and I wonder what they lost in the Hurricane. I wonder if they're among the missing.

So I've avoided writing about this because I can barely comprehend it. My folder still sits here on my desk holding pictures of the houses we liked. I can't bring myself to throw it away, as if keeping the photos and all of my little notes will make the devastation less real.