PTSD
I just came back from a walk to the convenience store where I was pelleted with a mixture of sleet and freezing rain. Strangely enough, I couldn’t help but to feel some anxiety at the sound of the falling sleet and feeling the humidity seeping through my gloves. Like many others who went through the ice storm of 1998, I probably have a mild form of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Getting through those 6 days with young kids, a snake and a new house were definitely not fun. I remember an inch-think sheet of ice flying off a truck on the highway and smashing onto the car in front of me. I remember diving over my daughter as an ice-laden branch fell on us. I remember waking up every hour to put logs in the fireplace. I remember going through the small tunnel at the bottom of highway 13 and plowing into a foot of floodwater. I remember waking up one night to the sound of golf ball size pieces of ice falling from our trees onto the car and the veranda. I remember being willing to sell my soul for a pair of dry gloves.
What I didn’t do is take pictures, something that I will regret to the end of my days.
We were actually here for that, at least the very beginning. We woke up early Monday morning to catch our flight out to Chicago. I drove a gut wrenching 40kmph down the Metropolitain in about 5cm of slush. It was difficult not only because of the slush but also because we feared we would miss our flight. We managed to get there and catch one of the last flights out. Otherwise it would have been a three hour drive back to the south shore and a month holed up in Ste Julie.
The Ice Storm along with two blizzards while trying to drive back made the ten years of coming up here for the holidays a dicey affair.