I’ll admit Nicholls closing on Friday was a bit different in my list of experiences but I wasn’t worried then. As any other student will probably confess, I was happy to get an early weekend. Gustav was far from my worries. I even joined a few friends for a Frisbee game in the quad while we waited for the traffic to go down.

We ate the food meant for our English Society meeting, which had to be canceled. It was quite a fun afternoon.

Looking back, I can definitively say that math class may not have been so bad.

Saturday morning, my brother woke me and told me to pack. We were evacuating.

That’s when I started to worry. We had stayed in Houma for quite a few hurricanes, including Katrina. This was going to be different.

What made this time different were a few things. First, it was supposedly coming straight for us. Second, my dad was on a trip in New York. Third, for a while we had no idea what to do.

Several hours into the trip to my cousin’s house in Denham Springs, my worry began to set in. Would my dog be safe? Would the boards hold? Would I have a house to return to?

The final thought, for some reason, bugged me the most. What if I lost all the textbooks I had just paid for?

When we finally got there, the past six hours of arguing over the GPS and my brother and mom’s increasing tension now behind me, I learned that much of my family would be joining us.

After being introduced to my four-year-old cousin’s toy room I’d be sleeping in, I tried to collect my thoughts and watch some news. That turned out to be a mistake.

Every report, favoring coverage of New Orleans of course, kept referring to my hometown as “a little town called Houma” and how it was basically great that it would be Gustav’s target rather than the Crescent City.

My worry did have a stopping point for a while when my dad arrived a few hours later. He told us how weird it was when he got out of the New Orleans airport. The city was literally empty. He said it was the eeriest thing he’d ever seen.

After the first night on the toy room floor, which was spent with constant noises from my little cousin playing his Wii at an unreasonable volume, I did not feel like I was the same person.

I was starting to feel powerless in this situation, suddenly aware that nature would do anything and I would only be able to watch from miles away.

For the first time in a while, I cried. It was short lived and silent, but the one tear I felt escape seemed like it contained all my optimism.

The next few days were a bit challenging. Eleven people in a house didn’t really get to me much and neither did the eventual loss of power or the increasing volume of my family. The Wii, however, was getting to me, especially since the television, hooked up to a generator, was being used for video games and not news.

What made me worry further was the onslaught of bad news. A close family friend of ours evacuated to Alabama and immediately had to be hospitalized after she collapsed. The St. Francis church roof was reportedly blown off as well as the Vandebilt gym roof.

My uncle’s call was the most disheartening. A tornado had hit his apartment and he suffered severe damage and loss.

First chance we got, we packed up to try and get back to Houma. Since my dad traveled to us alone, I rode with him back home. The thing that stayed in my head was the conversation we had the night before.

“Dad, I’m pretty scared,” I said.

Being a very positive thinker and one always ready to show us the bright side, I couldn’t believe his response.

“You should be.” And that’s when I knew that this situation was very real.

All I could do was sit there on the longest car ride I’d ever been on and wait.

When we finally pulled up to my house, there it was, standing and strong.

And right then, something else was there. My happiness came back and I wore it for the next two weeks. I’m sure I annoyed quite a few people.

Our damage was minimal, the worst being my brother’s skate ramp going through our garage door.

The next day hadn’t happened yet. I hadn’t yet seen the state of the people in Houma, how it would remind me of a post-apocalyptic movie, how simply grocery shopping and buying gas would turn into hours.

No, I had no idea of how the next week would play out, nor did I even care.

That night, as I shared the living room with my parents and brother, as we tried to receive air from the window unit AC, as the beastly generator let the whole street know we were home, I couldn’t help feel, at that moment, that I was the luckiest girl in the world.