Displaced Person

After Katrina blew through the Gulf Coast, there was a big ruckus over the correct term to use for those who had fled the storm. While refugee makes sense to me (as in seeking 'refuge from the storm'), it didn't go down well with those who had indeed sought refuge from the storm. And it seems that the dictionary backs them up. In contemporary usage, at least, the word generally applies to those who are fleeing persecution, and that wasn't the case here.

So - we move on to evacuee. Ok ... accurate description for many. They evacuated their homes and hometowns, or were evacuated from their communities in the aftermath. Since that is their chosen term to describe themselves, I can't quibble with it. For them it fits.

But it doesn't work for me. Oddly enough, I didn't evacuate. I was already out of town when the storm-which-shall-not-be named sent people scrambling. I haven't been kept from living in my community due to the devastation. Yet I am not home.

I am a displaced person.

I am currently living in a house about two miles from the place I called home before the storm. It is not my home, and will not be my home. I am blessed with a place to stay, to housesit, while my own house is being repaired. But it is not my furniture that I sit and sleep on, nor my pictures on the walls. My clothes, for the most part, still reside in suitcases. It is not home.

And I cannot call my house my home, either. It is an alien and unwelcoming place right now. I literally cannot tolerate spending more than a few minutes within its walls. Even my belongings within the house are displaced. Yes, there are some things which are where they belong - it's really hard to displace a waterbed! But there is so much which has been moved to garage and floors of other rooms that what one experiences is chaos and jumble. Then there's the barrenness of the rooms which have been stripped of everything in anticipation of restoration to wholeness.

My head says that I'm much better off than so many others. And it's true. However, my heart experiences the emptiness of not being home. Even my family is displaced. My son is at college (well, this would have been true storm or not). My dog is living with me. She would have pined too much to be separated for so long. My cat is staying at my mom's in Houston. You just don't move cats around willy-nilly, and she's already a bit of a psychokat as it is.

My longing is for 'home', that place where one is surrounded by the familiar and memories and belonging (even if it's not the place where one has lived throughout a lifetime), that corner of the world which is suffused with one's identity. But at the moment I have none.