It’s hard to see a place you love, a place you made plans for, to be utterly flattened like a goddamn garbage heap. It’s hard wondering if the people you passed in the grocery store, the old man standing in front of you at the coffee house, the little boy you baby sat…it’s hard wondering if they survived and it’s hard seeing the homes they made and loved ripped apart and finding their family photographs scratched in the sand on some deserted road.

It’s hard loving a place like Bay St. Louis.