Hurricane Irma aftermath: Solace in a set of dishes

 When Peggy Calkins returned to her Marathon home for the first time after Irma, she brought back a can of Pledge, expecting to polish her furniture.

Nothing in her comfortable life prepared her for losing the furniture and almost everything else.

“It was like a bomb had gone off,” she said. “You would go by a place you knew. You knew what you should be seeing. But you didn’t recognize it.”

For hours, Calkins could do nothing except sit on the floor. Finally, on Monday, she filled a bin of water in the yard and washed her dishes. For two days.

Making memories

Although the 1950s Little Venice home was almost totaled, Calkins’ colorful dishes collected over 35 years of Keys living were oddly intact under the bar, which had been picked up and hurled against a wall. Soaping each dish – the every-day whites, the fish platters and square plates with little pineapples  – brought back warm memories of parties and fun dinners for family and friends.

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Instinctively, the mother and grandmother used memories to ease her way into a new situation.

“In our family we have always put more emphasis on our memories than on things in life,” Calkins said.   

What she was doing was a powerful act of physical nostalgia, says geriatric psychiatrist Marc Agronin, M.D., who runs the Mental Health and Memory Center at Miami Jewish Health.

“When things are washed away, what do you have left? Touching, cleaning something that represented her intact past gave her strength,” Agronin said.

The meaning of things

From WWII forget-me-not bracelets to 9/11 rescue helmets, objects help us find meaning at times of disaster. Nostalgia – bringing back something that was meaningful and pleasurable from the past -- can give us a more positive perspective when our world is turned upside down, researchers say.

“We build attachments to objects as they come to represent people and relationships in our lives,” Agronin said. “We imbue them with great meaning, and they become symbols to us.”

At the edge of the eye wall where Hurricane Irma landed, Big Pine Key looks like a Jackson Pollack drip painting. Here Ryan O’Brien rode out Irma in a trailer home and lived to see his 25th birthday.

The trailer didn’t.

“What it’s coming down to right now, sometimes you don’t want to get out of bed,” the young man said. “You’re just sitting there thinking, ‘I’ve got to do this again, the same thing every day.’”

No way was he giving up, though. In a gesture of defiance, O’Brien hung a soiled American flag over the bow of his wrecked boat. From the shards of his possessions he plucked a leather-backed diary; an early birthday gift from a friend.  

“Not one page was messed up,” he held up the palm-sized book. “I took it as a sign.”    

On Saturday O’Brien sat down to write with a sense of purpose.  

“I wrote about all the stuff that went down in the hurricane,” he said. “Someday I’ll hand this to my kid and say, ‘This is my 25th birthday. I hope yours isn’t as crazy as this.’”  

It’s the little things

Even before Irma struck, Kitty and Tim Taylor grieved as they evacuated from Islamorada to Georgia, leaving behind a stray trailer park cat.

“Every time we tried to get him in the cage he would bolt,” Tim Taylor said. “We had to leave him. We knew he was gone."

When they returned to the trailer park, Taylor went inside first to spare his wife. Hearing the words, “Lots of water,” she followed him in, and burst into tears.

In those first dazed moments, Kitty Taylor slipped on the trailer stairs. Unhurt but overcome, she sat on the ground for several minutes.  

Then a black cat streaked across her path and bolted under a neighbor’s trailer.

“L.B.B! L.B.B!” the couple cried. It was the stray.

Taylor picked herself up and went back in the flooded trailer.

“This makes it OK,” she said. “He’s probably so hungry. I’m going to see if the cat food survived.”

Comforting rituals

Some pieces of Calkins’ didn’t survive: a set of tropical marguerita glasses, a treasured gift from her daughter, had smashed into bits.  

“I used to say, 'Oh, I won’t use those, I’ll use the plastic,” Calkins said. “It taught me a lesson. Next time I’ll use them, and if they get broken it will be when I’m having a good time, not when a hurricane decides to take it.”

Her refrigerator was still stuffed with seaweed. Mold had started forming on the sills. The house would have to be gutted and rebuilt to code on stilts.

At the end of her second day of washing, Calkins felt gritty and tired. 

“I’m going to hose off, put my feet up and pour a glass of wine,” she said. “In one of my surviving wine glasses.”

Follow this reporter on Twitter @PatriciaBorns.