Lost Six Oak Trees and the Last Excuse I Had

A storm ended a life I wasn’t living anyway. Here’s what I got to start instead.

Hurricane Laura roaring accross the marsh in SW Louisiana

What Hurricane Laura Destroyed (And What It Set Free)

In 2020, Hurricane Laura tore through my hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana, and decided my landscaping needed a more dramatic opinion.

Officially a Category 4, though anyone who lived through it will tell you the weather service was being diplomatic.

It wasn’t rain that devastated the city. It was wind. Violent, unrelenting, tornado-like wind that ripped things out by the roots.

Including six enormous oak trees on my property.

If you’re from the South, you know the kind — ancient, sprawling, romantic, the kind that feel permanent, the kind you imagine will outlive you.

They didn’t.

They were thrown across my yard like toys, roots exposed, dignity gone. Two of them were tossed onto my car, bending it in half — which is one way, I suppose, to find out you needed a new car anyway.

And something in me cracked open watching them lie there.

I’ve always believed trees are more than plants. They’re witnesses, timekeepers, guardians.

Seeing them uprooted felt personal. Intimate.

As if the storm had reached into my own life and said, pay attention.

At the time, I was already standing in uncertainty — alone, caring for my elder sister, wondering whether I had the strength or the desire to rebuild yet again.

And suddenly the question wasn’t just about the house.

It was about me.

Here’s what I’d been carrying: my dream was never the traditional one.

I tried the marriages — three of them, in case two hadn’t already been a sufficient warning sign. I raised my daughters. I did the expected things.

But the dream that lived quietly inside me was about freedom, creativity, curiosity — living in the center of things, making art, letting my soul lead instead of obligation.

I had been rebuilding other people’s versions of my life for decades.

Standing in front of those uprooted trees, the question became undeniable: do I stay and rebuild what’s been lost, or do I finally pull up my own roots?

I packed what I could fit in a small van and left, which turns out to be a surprisingly small amount of a life once you actually have to choose.

With help from a few locals who hadn’t fled — thousands had — I loaded what mattered: paintings I’d saved, a few belongings, some furniture. Not exactly the packing list a home magazine would have recommended, but it was mine.

And I said goodbye to my sister.

I knew, standing there, that I would likely never see her again.

I was right. She passed away two years later.

I drove to Virginia where my daughter lived.

No plan, no safety net — just the stubborn belief that I couldn’t rebuild someone else’s expectation of MY life one more time.

What followed wasn’t pretty.

Within months, COVID hit, I got sick, three months in bed, savings drained, three months behind on rent facing eviction. If you are ever in the market for a masterclass in bad timing, may I suggest fleeing a hurricane directly into a global pandemic. Mercy me.

By this time, my daughter and her family had packed up and moved two hours away, because apparently one obstacle at a time was never really my style.

But even then, flat on my back, something was different.

The life I was trying to build — however unstable — was FINALLY mine. Not a reconstruction of what had been, not a version that fit someone else’s expectations. Mine.

So I kept going.

I started painting daily, small works, then larger, and put them online. I sold a few, to actual strangers, who I like to imagine did not immediately regret it.

I started writing. Not because I had a platform. Because the words needed somewhere to go.

Sitting with my soul, two minutes at a time — which is roughly the outer limit of my patience for anything resembling meditation became my hourly companion.

Slowly — so slowly it was almost invisible — things started organizing themselves. Not through hustle, not through a plan, but through the quiet, repeated act of paying attention to what was actually true.

Five years later, here’s what’s true.

I live simply, downtown, surrounded by light and my own paintings. I write every day, and readers have found me. I sell my art. I support myself through what I create. That was my dream, that I had allowed everyone elses expectations of my life to bury it.

More than anything, I wake up inside a life that feels natural, unforced, mine — whatever “normal” is supposed to mean.

The joy I feel now is different from any joy I knew before.

It isn’t conditional, it isn’t borrowed, it isn’t built on anyone else’s approval.

It’s steady, daily, mine.

The kind that comes from knowing — finally, at 70 — that you’re living the life your soul imagined long before you had language for it.

That is why I advocate so strongly for going back to reclaim our dreams. Not because we must revive the exact dream in its original form, but because we can recover what lived at the heart of it — the longing, the aliveness, the sense of possibility, the part of ourselves that knew what mattered.

When we bring that essence into later life, it opens an entirely new door: new dreams become visible, new possibilities begin to feel real, and we gain a clearer understanding of what the long-awaited dream was truly asking us to pursue all along.

Hurricane Laura destroyed six ancient oak trees.

But it also destroyed the last excuse I had for not choosing myself.

I wish I could tell you I’d have gotten there without it. I don’t know that I would have. Growth, it turns out, is not always self-motivated — sometimes it requires a Category 4 assist. That’s the part I’ve made peace with, not the part I’m proud of — and for the choosing itself, however it arrived, I will always be grateful.

If any of this sounds like the life you keep circling back to, there’s a Perks page now — you’re welcome to go look, no subscription required to peek. What you’ll find is reserved for annual members: guidebooks, resources, and a few things I built specifically for the women who’ve decided to stay a while and want to reclaim the essence of their own dreams before life took over.

No discount to chase here, just the invitation itself: come see what’s waiting, and if it’s time, join as an annual member and it’s yours.

Visit the Perks page