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Jerry Anthony Eastmoor Drive
"They're the two reasons I came back," said Jerry Anthony as he flipped through photos of his two sons, Joshua and Jeremiah. "We hadn't taken anything out of the house when we were evacuated on Thursday. My wife packed a box of our documents and a change of clothes for the kids. We left with that." Even after water filled the street, Anthony returned to a dry house in the afternoon of the evacuation to haul out what he could. He walked back to his canoe with the most valuable things he could carry: the family computer and Jeremiah's violin. Then the water rose. "I came back on Friday to save as much as I could and move things up away from the water," he said. "I couldn't take much out, so it had to be lightweight and easy to carry." "It wasn't until we were canoeing in that I planned to
ONE YEAR LATER
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salvage the toys." The water was two feet high and rising when Anthony opened the door to his house. After an hour and a half of moving books and other irreplaceables to dry ground, Anthony packed what he could into a plastic trash bag. "I took some photos of my kids from before the digital era," he said. "My sons had lost their books and their toys. But my younger son, Joshua, has a lot of plush toys. That was what I could save." "It was something to reduce the trauma. He was very, very happy to have them." But, there was one stuffed toy that Anthony couldn't find. "He has one very special one. A lion, Aslan. I couldn't find him," he said. "But when we came back, there was a pile of clothes on the bed and on top of the pile was the lion. The clothes had soaked up the water, but Aslan was safe." July 2009 | Little Village
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