Dear Readers and Friends,

I confess: August and February are my least favorite months. They both have crappy weather where I live. One is too hot and humid, the other is too cold and wet. But here we are, at the end of August, and keeping an eye out for hurricanes forming.

When I was a little girl, we didn’t worry about—or have—the monster storms we have now. Camille hit Biloxi in 1969. It eradicated that part of the coast, but it didn’t stretch all across the Gulf Coast states. Then Katrina cam...