Alongside the debris and muck they stir up, storms have an incredible power to bring a lot of emotions to the forefront. In my case, Hurricane Ida, a Category 4 storm that made landfall in southeastern Louisiana in late August 2021, conjured up a lot of nostalgia.
I had evacuated ahead of the storm, but when I drove back a few days afterward to assess the damage of my home and check on aging neighbors, it set in that this kind of climate-change-driven anxiety was our new norm. I spent some time mourning. It felt like too much to deal with. I wanted nothing more than to return to a time when I was either too young to fully comprehend the dangers our planet faces, or before we allowed this nation’s leadership to ridicule the science we should’ve listened to decades ago.
So, I took myself there. First on the coattails of Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much.” It made me want to dance the way Mother and I used to on weekend afternoons, when she’d open the windows on crisp breezy days in particular, back when our seasons made sense, and play the classics, the ones that felt good to your soul. As I motored in my white station wagon across two-lane highways and over seemingly endless bridges spanning marsh and swampland, those memories propelled me. It was a natural transition into Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, a two-disc album once permanently housed inside my mom’s pride and joy: a six-disc CD changer that sat atop our wooden entertainment stand like an altar. As palm trees on the Gulf Coast turned into prolific pine tree forests as I got further into Mississippi, I turned on the album’s opening track, “Love’s in Need of Love Today.” Wonder introduces himself as the “friendly announcer” who has news for everybody. “What I’m about to say,” he continues, “Could mean the world’s disaster.”
