I’ve lived in Louisiana almost all my life, and I’ve experienced hurricanes as far back as Betsy in September of 1965. It smashed into New Orleans as a Category 4 hurricane with winds as high as 125 mph. I was almost thirteen at the time; old enough to be terrified. The worst part of the storm came across at night. Our windows trembled and shuddered from the relentless howling winds punctuated by debris slamming into the house. We moved from room to room like human pinballs, flung from one place to another in reaction to the merciless gusts. My parents, my two grandmothers, my brother and I stayed as far away from the windows as possible.

Sometime after the eye passed over us and the second battering began, our kitchen window shattered. My father, who already had boards ready, grabbed one, and asked me to hand him the nails.

The nails. He’d asked me earlier that day to get the jar of nails out of the carport storage area. I’d forgotten them.

Over forty years later, I still feel the sludge of guilt, shame, and fear remembering the shocking disappointment that flashed over my father’s face. Water poured through the window. My father struggled to hold the board in place over the window. I begged him to let me go then and get the nails. I pleaded. I told him he could tie a rope around my waist so I could walk out there and come back with them.

Of course it was ridiculous. Even tethered by a rope, I would have been human wreckage. But at the time, the absolute horror of watching the consequence of my stupidity gripped me more than the fear of facing hurricane force winds.

I kept repeating, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.” But the water kept coming in. I remember my father looking around the kitchen, as much as one could look without the benefit of electricity in the coal black darkness.

“Help your mother hold this against the window. I’ve got an idea.” He grabbed his hammer and ran into the living room. He knelt by the closet and started hammering the bottom door pin, then the top one out. My father carried the door into the kitchen, shoved it against the windows, then pushed our kitchen table against the door to secure it in place.

Three inches of water later, the winds stopped pushing against the window. It was Betsy’s only damage to our house. But not her only damage. She left me the memory of that door, that window, and that sense of having failed my father in the one thing he’d asked me to do.

Forty years later, Katrina would teach me another life lesson. Then Gustave.

Now, I watch the news as Ana’s five-day track puts her into the Gulf of Mexico. Too close for comfort.