This Space for Rent

Regrettably, there is always a cloud wrapped around that silver lining.

The best's mother has a summer house in Mississippi, on the gulf of Mexico, halfway between Gulfport and Pascagoula. It's 15 feet above sea level, and less than 200 feet from the water.

"Hi, I'm the Gulf of Mexico and this 25 foot storm surge is going to come ashore in front of your summer house. Hope you don't mind."

Err, oops? The general consensus is that the family will be picking pieces of their summer house out of the bayous and woods several miles north of where the foundation block is. Not that we know for certain -- the local branch of the family packed up and bolted for Florida when Katrina cleared the Florida peninsula and morphed into a BHFH -- but the smart money is not on finding a muddy house with maybe one or two broken windows. The silver lining here is that the house is new, and newly purchased, so not much will be lost in the furnishings department.

We're far more worried about the best's sister, who lives a few miles west of there in a subdivision just on the ocean side of highway 90. That house is further above sea level, and it's much farther away from the ocean, and it's got undeveloped woods and bayous between it and the Gulf of Mexico, and it's a single-story house that's made of brick instead of being a typical beach house on stilts, so there's a chance they'll come back to nothing more extreme than alligators, snakes, and a foot of mud in the living room.