Lately I have become disenchanted with my kitchen. I don’t know if it’s the fact that it’s small or that we only have an eat in kitchen. Maybe it’s the lack of storage. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but when I get like this I look back on when we didn’t even have a working kitchen.

When most of Baton Rouge flooded in August of 2016, we lost about 95% of our belongings. We took in 4 ft of water, so basically our whole house had to be gutted. Did you know that refrigerators float and then fall?

I can’t even begin to describe the smell. We called it the flood stink.

We wanted to get back into our house as soon as possible, so we moved in before everything was finished. The kids were on the driveway washing all of the kitchen things that could be saved.

My neighbor, Cindy and her husband moved back in about the same time we did and there was one other family that did also. At night it was like a scene from The Walking Dead because no one was there and it was extremely quiet.

Our kitchen, even when we moved in, wasn’t fully functional. This is how I washed dishes. I would heat the water up in a pan on the electric skillet.

We had a little coffee bar.

I cooked everything in the electric skillet.

I told myself I would never forget how hard that time was, but time fades those memories. I told myself that I would always be grateful for what we have, but here I am feeling unmotivated and disheartened. That’s why I keep these pictures so I can look back and remember. And although it was a difficult time it really made me realize that stuff is just stuff. It’s motivated me to want to go through my kitchen and purge everything we aren’t using. Hopefully I can get started on that in a few days. I just need to lighten the load.

And I will always be so grateful for the Cajun Navy who rescued us off our roof after a sleepless night.

And also for my neighbor Cindy who could always make me laugh no matter what.