We are at the year anniversary here in wnc post Hurricane Helene.  I am hearing that there is potential for this next week or so to have more of the weather that changed this place so dramatically. It is something that we are still recovering from. Everyone here still very much has weather related PTSD. It is hard to believe looking at this picture that more terrible stuff could happen.

They are so ignorant and they don't even know it. So easy to catch a fit and easily throw it. Walking the earth being led by a string.By a tyrant who'd drop them faster than last night's fling. Complacent, complicit and led like a sheep.Fear it will be too late before they know they're in too deep. For they are too busy repeating what they are told. All the whole thinking they are verbally spitting gold. They're not though. They're just dumb.

YouTube video by Ashley B

We have been in North Carolina for 10 years. I can't even tell you where the time went. I blinked and my baby girl isn't 11 anymore, she's 21. Many of her 1st experiences happened here. I blinked and barely remember what it was like to be afraid to drive here 🤣. We've traveled so much. I overcame my fear of traveling long distances and I've driven from Florida, Georgia and Tennessee to Ohio, Washington DC and NYC.

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I wonder...You know that feeling that you get when you remember what you were wearing on 9/11? Or that feeling you have every single time you hear an airplane in the sky and you look up and you just....watch? Just in case?Or that feeling you got as the death toll rose higher and higher...and then higher?I wonder what our bodies are going to feel and remember about this?

.....It needs to be said that black women have been saying all of this and more for ages and not enough people are listening..... I remember some years back now when confederate monuments and statues were being dismantled or renamed and many conservatives were upset that they felt that their history and culture was trying to be erased. No amount of explaining to them helped them see the reasons why it was no longer deemed appropriate to celebrate someone for helping to win a battle for freedom while they were at the same time slave holders. 

In 2015, when my life was imploding and I was moving my daughter and I from Florida to North Carolina, I was determined to do something different. Instead of just barreling my way from tragedy to t…