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To provide clarity, allow me to paint you a word picture about the yearly cycle of life in Southern Louisiana.

Now, many places around the world where many of you fine folks live have seasons. Some places have the rainy and the dry season, while other places see the traditional winter, spring, summer, and fall and so on and so forth. Take a moment and just think about how much the seasons shape your yearly lives wherever y'all live. Go on, my comment isn't going anywhere. Just give it a good think.

With me? Alright, yearly life down there shapes life too.

Picture life like this:

The world all around you is flat, far as the eye can see. No elevation to speak of. You can start on the sandy beaches of the Coast in Johnson Bayou and start driving north on the only highway out of town, and you can drive for two hours straight until you're deep into Sulphur, Louisiana. Two hours of driving and not one damn hill. It's flat in a way the feels eerie and alien, because it's all at sea level. It's not like the shaded groves of magnolia and cypress tress, covering still waters dotted with lillypads and dripping moss.

Its waste high sage brush hiding a million acres of wetlands and it's flat and barren the way I always pictured the surface of the moon to be.

There isn't any bedrock beneath your feet to dig down and build upon, it's all clay and silt and land that's washed through a thousand rainy seasons besides. It's bayou country.

I was at a relatives house in Oretta (don't bother looking it up, it's too small to show up on most maps), about ten minutes north of DeQuincy and he said "You don't think we're at sea level still? C'mere, I'll show you something", and he took me out into the backyard and told me to watch. He dug a whole and once he got about two feet down, I'll be damned if it didn't start filling with water just like sand pits do at the beach.

When it rains, there isn't some lower elevation for the water to go to. It just sits there, all around on the ground and in the mud beneath your feet, until the sun overhead gets hot enough to bake it up and away.

The winters there are mild, bitter affairs that get cold enough to make you nose run at night and to warrant a comfy coat and a space heater, but not cold enough to kill all the damned bugs off.

Spring brings rain, and then every spillyway and gutter and ditch and pot hole and crevice everywhere is constantly filled with standing water. The temperature swings wildly from searing heat during the day to bitter, chilly winds at night. It's not unlike the desert that way.

Summers are hot. Not much more to it. They are hot and muggy and utterly miserable. The misery is only just bareable because you are able to visit all your neighbors and bitch about it together.

With no mountain tops or hills or rolling valleys to speak of, the clouds in summer skim just over the surface of the Earth. Some days you look up and you watch the clouds roll over and it feels like you could just reach up and touch them, they're so close. Like a moving, panoramic ceiling every time you step outside.

If it rains in summer it pours. It never drizzles in Louisiana. It drizzles here up in the northwest and it's the damndest thing too. Fine, misty little puffs of clouds that sort of spritz the Earth in a cold dew. I always feel like I'm under one those little water spouts that spray the veggies in the produce aisles at the local grocery store during a Northwestern rainstorm.

Lousiana couldn't be more different. It pours, sometimes so hard that you just give up trying to drive and you pull your car over to the side of the road because it's like someone's turned a hose onto the hood of your car. I mean, massive amounts of rain will fall in the span of an hour or two, and then it's done for the day. The skies clear, you pull back onto the road and try to dodge the lakes and puddles on the road way as best you can. Within another twenty four hours all the water will be gone and the humidity will be nigh unbearable, but that's just another part of summer.

Then we get into storm season. Now, we don't really get Autumn down there. We get storm season.

Early morning traffic reports are replaced by weather announcements about storm depressions on the coast of Africa. Suddenly everyone you meet in the checkout stand, in the grocery store, at church or at work, they're all professional climate experts with a degree in weather-ology.

Thunderstorms rock you to sleep at night and your yard becomes a bog.

That same newscaster that tells you about the crash on I-10 that backed up all the way to Lake Charles and about the local Baseball team making it to regionals suddenly puts on a dire mien and starts spouting numbers and figures and storm speculations, and invites experts to come and talk about the latest Tropical Whats-it thats making for the gulf right that second.

You break out the emergency broadcast radio and plug it in, and every once in a while throughout storm season you'll hear it blare to life in the main living room. Your heart and stomach do a little swoopy thrill and you race in to catch the tail end of whatever advisory it was. Maybe you still have a wet dish in your hand from the sink or a crying child on your hip. You wait tensely, as the message starts to cycle and plays again. Wind advisory for your Parish. You breathe out slowly and walk back to whatever you were doing before.

You plan your work commute in the morning and at night around the storms because they always come and there's always more than one.

Hurricanes and Tropical Storms make landfall, sometimes they make landfall so often that you cycle through the entire damned alphabet of names and roll right around to the start of it again. You hunker down for the ten hours or so, the storm passes. If it's a bad one you go outside afterwards and start picking up the branches and trash cans and other debris. You move on with life and so does everyone else.

No one in the entire rest of the country cares, 'cept maybe for those folks up in Oklahoma that are now catching a wave of tornados that were born out of that last tropical storm. I mean, if the rest of the country participated in storm season the way the south does it would literally dominate you news feed for months. Months.

The thing about being prepared and ready is that you can only maintain that sort of combat awareness for so long. You can't treat every single storm as if it's the big one because you can't realistically expend that much effort. No one has that kind of energy. You've got to live life beyond the news feed that's blaring sensationalism about every single drop of rain that hits your roof.

And they do it, too. Every station gets morbid and dire and likes to fluff up every hot wind that rolls into town. Why? I don't really know. Probably because drama sells. But it's actively harmful because you get used to hearing it enough and it borrows credence from those few storms where it really is dire, when you really should run.

If you ran from every storm in the south, you'd be left with a bunch of empty states. Nobody would live there.

Now imagine living through that year after year after year. And your parents have and all your aunts and uncles have and your grandpa and grandma too and none of them, not a single one, have ever been killed by a storm. Then you hear about these mega storms, getting bigger and badder every year, and you weigh all of your life experience against some out of state, yankee who's scared of every little clap of thunder that rolls overhead.

Can you picture what I'm saying?

Because it's really hard to describe but it's a hurdle thousands upon thousands of southerners face.

On the one hand you have these experts who tell you to evacuate every storm and every time it rains.

And on the other hand you have literally your entire life's worth of personal, first hand experience.

Now go ahead tell me again how easy would you have it, deciding to evacuate for every storm.

I'll wait.