What would you take?

[pegkerr]

Since there has been nothing to do at work, I have been following the Hurricane Katrina coverage obsessively. Still worried about dreamflower02, of whom there has still been no word, even second or third-hand. Understandable, yet difficult.

What if I were in such a situation? I read about all those miserable frightened people huddled in the Dome and can all too vividly imagine myself and my family in such a situation. (That's the trouble with a writer's well-developed imagination.) How would I do holding my girls together in a situation that starts our like a surreal adventure and turns into something like a nightmare, and you're trying to push away the thought, is there a chance we might actually not survive this?

I looked at Poppy Z. Brite's entry here and wondered what I might do? If you got the weather disaster evacuation order, and you had only fifteen minutes to a half an hour to grab what you could (it has to be able to fit in your car), knowing that everything else you leave behind might be destroyed--what would you take?

Me:

My thirty years of paper journals
The family history/geneology box
Photographs, photograph albums, negatives
Both computers
Jewelry
A suitcase of clothes (very small; I'd depend on the Red Cross for the rest)

Edited to add: Oh yeah. And I hope it would occur to me to take our camping equipment. Tent, sleeping bags, and propane stove would come in very handy. Duh.

The girls I imagine would take:
Their Kit and Kirsten dolls
Their treasure boxes (filled with their favorite childhood keepsakes)
Delia would take her bunny blanket

After that, I'm not sure what they would try to save.

Rob? Not sure.

And you?

Comments

[aitchellsee.livejournal.com]

Those of us with access to scanners might well think of making good scans of those very important family photos and other documents with high sentimental value and burning them to CD or DVD now, ahead of any emergency requiring evacuation, and socking a copy away in the Grab-and-Go kit (see post about Jim Macdonald's recommendations for such an emergency kit, above)

The world seems a fragile place, some days.

HLC

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Yes; I have a friend who lost a lot of family photos due to ordinary basement flooding. It seems like a sensible precaution even without imagining more wide-scale disasters.

[naomikritzer]

Not just a grab-and-go kit; you don't always have time to grab (in a house fire, for instance, you really should not stop for your valuables -- just GET OUT). Have an off-site backup of your important stuff -- you can easily leave a DVD or CD-ROM at your office, your parents' house, your best friend's house, etc., etc., etc.