Under a canopy of live oaks

Michel B. Menard home

Michel B. Menard home

Quiet, peaceful, lovely.

It’s October now, but back in September, while the first two weeks of the month ticked slowly by, as if on a hand-carved nineteenth-century wooden grandfather clock, I dusted off my cherished Galveston history books and read again, in memorium, not about the more recent events of Hurricane Ike in 2008, ugly though they were, but of a foggier past, the long-ago but not forgotten, almost inconceivable tragedy, that was the Great Storm of 1900.

Truly, Galveston is a city of ghosts, a town that has witnessed past suffering and sorrow and rueful, wretched loss beyond any sort of present-day comprehension. And for some reason, maybe for that very reason, I feel a pressing need, at this time of year, to acknowledge it. Read the rest of this entry »