Walls! We have walls. The framers finished the outside walls Friday and the trusses went up yesterday, and this afternoon after church the three of us walked through the house the way you'd walk through a real house. Cody stood in the middle of his room and put his arms out and touched both walls, which he couldn't do in his old room, which I did not point out. He picked where his bed goes. Away from the window. He didn't say why and I didn't ask.

My husband Terry stood in the garage where the storm shelter is going in the floor. A steel box with a sliding lid, bolted down, room for eight. He's been drawing it on napkins since June. I stood where the kitchen sink will be and looked out where the window will be, at Dale and Wanda's next door, whose cellar is the reason we're alive, and at the empty lot across the street where Gil and Patty lived until they sold to a builder and moved to Norman.

Last night was the first cool night since spring. We sat outside the trailer in lawn chairs, us and Dale and Wanda, and you could see the new rafters against the stars like ribs. I have not sat outside after dark and just looked up since May. Clear as a bell, not a cloud anywhere, and I still checked the southwest every few minutes. Terry saw me doing it and put his hand on my knee and didn't say a word. Seventeen years married and that man still knows when to keep quiet.

Days since May 3: 146

A line of storms came through last night. Not a tornado watch, not anything, just a thunderstorm, the kind I used to open the windows for. The weather radio went off at 9:40 with a severe thunderstorm warning for hail and I was out the door with Cody in his pajamas before Terry got his boots on. We sat on the bench in Dale and Wanda's cellar with a flashlight for forty-five minutes while it rained. That's all it did. Rained, and some pea-size hail, which on a trailer roof sounds like the end of the world.

Terry didn't come down. He sat on the cellar steps with the door propped open and watched it. I was mad at him and I'm still a little mad, which isn't fair. He says he has to watch it so it can't sneak up on him. I have to be under the ground. We are both right.

The counselor I've been seeing at church says what happens to me is normal. My heart pounds and I can't get a breath and my hands go numb, and I know it's just a thunderstorm, and knowing doesn't help one bit. She says it gets better with time. It isn't better yet. Cody slept the rest of the night on the fold-out with me and I was glad of him. Rain on a tin roof used to be my favorite sound in the world.

Days since May 3: 142

The church group from Missouri came back! Eleven of them this time, in two vans and a pickup pulling a trailer full of tools. These are the same people who showed up the second week in May with chainsaws and work gloves and spent six days hauling what used to be our neighborhood out to the curb. Nobody called them. They just came. This time they came to help our framer and two other families on the street.

Harlan, who runs their group, is seventy-one and was up on our top plate by eight this morning. His wife Jean brought four pans of peach cobbler and a ham. We ate off plywood on sawhorses in the middle of our new living room with no roof over it, and the sky was blue, and nobody looked up but me.

At supper Harlan prayed for the people in the Carolinas, and it hit me. All week I've been watching the news. The hurricane, all those cars stuck on the interstate trying to get out, and now the water in North Carolina, whole towns under. I know exactly what those people's next week is going to be like, and the week after that, and the one after that. The lists. The phone calls. The smell. I cried right into the cobbler. Jean just rubbed my back. She didn't tell me it would be all right, which is why I like her.

Days since May 3: 138

The lumber came Friday, two flatbeds of it. Framers start tomorrow if it doesn't rain. Too tired to write. Cody's asleep in his clothes and I'm about to be. More later.

Terry was off, so we spent the holiday at the table in the trailer (which is also the bed, the desk and the dining room) going through the insurance papers again.

Here is what I've learned about insurance since May. The house part is okay. We had replacement cost on the house, thank the Lord, and the second adjuster, a nice man from Texas who has worked storms for twenty years, wrote it up fair. The first one lasted a week and we never saw him again. The third one handles contents, and contents is where they get you.

They want a list of everything you owned. Room by room. What you paid and when. From memory, because the receipts were in the house. So I have spent my summer sitting in a trailer trying to remember what was in my linen closet. Four bath towels, blue. Two sets of sheets for the queen bed. The Christmas tablecloth my mother cross-stitched. How do you put a number on that? They do. They took off for age on Cody's bunk beds and on my wedding china.

We're going to come out short. Terry says we came out alive and that's the only number that matters, and he's right, and I would still like to throw the calculator out the trailer door.

Days since May 3: 126

Cody's been back in school two weeks. Third grade. His teacher is wonderful. She lets him look out the window at the sky whenever he needs to, and she keeps a weather radio on her desk, because three kids in her class lost their houses.

The nightmares aren't every night anymore. Maybe three nights a week. He wakes up saying it's the train, Mama, it's the train, which is what it sounded like, which everybody says and it's true. Then he wants to sleep in his shoes. The school counselor says let him. So he sleeps in his tennis shoes with his flashlight and his Pokemon cards in a baggie, which is his tornado kit. He packed it himself. I haven't had the heart to tell him Pokemon cards aren't essential supplies. Maybe they are.

Tonight he asked me if God sent the tornado. I said no. He asked who did, then. I said it was just weather, baby, warm air and cold air running into each other. He thought about that for a long time and then said, "Then weather is mean." I didn't have anything for that.

Days since May 3: 120

THE SLAB IS POURED. I'm putting that in capital letters.

The concrete trucks came at six this morning because it was going to be a hundred by noon. The crew worked like crazy and by lunch there was a smooth gray floor where our house is going to be. Randy, our contractor, let Cody put his handprint in the corner of the garage slab, and Terry wrote the date and THE EASLEYS CAME BACK with a nail. Then I put my hand next to Cody's, and Terry put his next to mine. Wanda took pictures. I can't wait to get them developed.

We waited seven weeks to get Randy. Half the contractors in the state are booked till spring, and the other half came in from out of state with magnetic signs on their trucks, took people's deposits and disappeared. Randy is from Norman and goes to Wanda's sister's church and has shown up every single day he said he would. I'd hug him if he didn't look so scared of me.

Days since May 3: 108

Three months and five days. First entry. Hi to whoever finds this. My sister-in-law Deb talked me into it. She says writing things down helps, and the pastor said I could use the computer in the church office, where I work part-time, after everybody goes home. So here I am in the dark with the copier humming.

For the record: it was Monday, May 3, a little after seven in the evening. Terry, Cody and I ran next door to Dale and Wanda's storm cellar with the sirens going. When we came up, our house was gone. Not damaged. Gone. We were all okay. That's the whole story and it's also not the story at all.

The FEMA trailer sits where our driveway used to be, plugged into a power pole the electric company put up and a hose Terry ran from the water meter. It's about as long as our old living room and kitchen put together. The air conditioner runs all day and it's still 85 inside by four o'clock. Three people and a dog. Oh yes, the dog. Buster turned up three days after, two streets over, under somebody's pickup, muddy and hungry and fine. Cody hasn't let him out of his sight since.

People ask if I'm grateful. I am. I say it every night. We were in a hole in the ground and we came out, all three of us, and there are people from our church who can't say that. But grateful and tired aren't opposites. I'm both. Some days I'm mostly tired.

Days since May 3: 97