Katrina always wondered what her world would be like, if only she had been born a month later, if only she wasn’t premature, if only her birthday was September 12, 2005 instead of August 4th. If she could have just stayed in there, in the warm comfort of her mother’s belly, her life would be so different. Maybe she wouldn’t have been named after that granny. Maybe she’d be Hazel Orleans, after the other one.
What a different world she’d live in without the taunts and the calls, the horrible whispers whirling around her as she walked down the hall at school or the playground in the park.
If she was Hazel, she’d be celebrating her heritage, her warm brown skin color, her eyes like the changing sunset, eyes like her grandma Katrina, ironically. Granny Hazel, afterall, had the bluest of blues – like her mother and her daughter, but not like Katrina. Granny Katrina’s eyes of gold with flakes of grass and sky and dirt – they were the most interesting thing about her, and the same could have been said for the younger Katrina too, if she had just been born in September. If it just wasn’t for that damn hurricane, she thought, which left her in the dark, stuck in an eternal storm that wouldn’t let anyone forget, even there in Houston.
Her name said it all, at least it said all that anyone wanted to hear. No one would listen past that. No one would look for the sunrise in her eyes. Instead they felt the storm’s touch. She just wanted someone to call her anything else.
Her parents didn’t understand, they didn’t hear her demands, her pleas. When she spoke of this topic, they were swept back, torn to that year, that month, that week, that day – when the storm shredded their town, their street, their house, how their baby had almost been swept to sea off the porch of their drowning house. And how it was this terrible fright that saved all of their lives, for as they jumped into the street’s river to catch Katrina’s floating bassinet, their second story crashed into their first, following the roof. Katrina saved their lives as Katrina destroyed all around them.
To them, Katrina was beautiful – name, face and soul – and strong, just like her grandmother who, too, saved their lives years before, in a world, a life before Texas – proof they could weather any storm, any time. Why would they let some old meteorlogical society’s random appointment of names change their devotion to the woman, the women, who saved them. They’d have none of that nonsense. They had it first.
That meant something, but Katrina could not yet understand what. She was just going to have to prove to the world that she could be the hurricane and make a name for herself. If nothing else, when she was old enough to contact the Social Security Administration and make Hazel official, not just the nickname she so desperately pleaded the other second graders to call her.
Angele’ has been a professional writer for 18 years, working in a variety of nonfiction platforms as a journalist (in TV news, web, print and social media) and as a blogger. She teaches at Northern Arizona University’s School of Communication. Angele’ often ponders realities, shadows and light to write by at 4am. You can find her daily musings on Twitter @AngeleOutWest.
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