Andrew-versary in 2021

Twenty-nine years ago today Hurricane Andrew slammed into South Florida and destroyed my parents’ house - with my parents and me in it.

I was eighteen years old, had just graduated from high school, and was due to leave for college in Tampa the following week. I was also remarkably stubborn, and though we knew the storm was coming and my parents wanted to go to a hurricane shelter the night before, I refused to leave my dogs.

I went to bed as normal on the night of the 23rd, after helping my dad put hurricane shutters and plywood over all the windows. I woke up sometime in the middle of the night and it literally sounded like a train was going past our house. I was startled so I went into my parents’ room to see if they were awake, and while I was in there I heard a huge crash. I jumped into their walk-in closet and looked up to see the door to attic flapping. (We found out later the storm had actually picked up the roof off our house and then set it back down.) When I ventured back down the hall to my room, I found the window over my bed had blown in - that was the sound I’d heard, and thank goodness I was awake or I would have been covered in glass.

It was a harrowing night. We were on the north wall of the eye of the hurricane, so we didn’t ever really experience the freakish calm that you get in the eye of the storm. We had two sets of sliding glass doors, one in the living room and one in the family room/kitchen, and both blew out of their casings. My clearest memory of that night is my mom sitting in my bathroom with all three dogs while my dad and I tried to hold the double front doors of the house closed. I think that was before the living room sliders blew out, because at that point it would have been impossible.

It was a fast storm, and afterwards the landscape was basically unrecognizable. I remember thinking we wouldn’t be able to even get out of the neighborhood, until my friend R drove up in his Jeep - he was driving around checking on friends that day, and we were so glad to see him as he could give us an idea of what to expect on the roads.

A few days later, we had to drive to West Palm Beach to rent a car so my mom could drive me to college. All of our cars were in varying states of disrepair, so we didn’t want to drive that far with any of them. My parents lived in the house without power for almost a month before their insurance company set them up with an apartment. It took nearly a year for the house to be rebuilt - by the time they got a contractor, mold had settled into the walls and it had to be torn down to the studs.

But really, we were lucky, because our house was older and at least a little solid. There was a new development called Country Walk across the highway from us, and it had been built hurriedly and it turned out shoddily, and the entire neighborhood was damn near leveled.

There have been bigger storms since then, such as Katrina and Irma, but this is the only one I’ve lived through, and it had an enormous impact on me. Thunderstorms made me irrationally nervous for a long time after, and my mom was never the same - after my dad died, I remember driving down to Ft. Myers to pick her up when there was a particularly bad storm coming one year and she didn’t want to stay in Florida. Actually I may have flown down and then driven her and her dogs up to Atlanta in her car.

I can’t believe it’s been nearly thirty years. I haven’t even been to Miami in ages, and both my parents are gone, and that house was sold in 1999 I think. I’m the only one left who remembers what is was like for us in that house that night.