When Hurricane Milton Rattled My Mermaid Table, I Chose Laughter Over Ruin

Night came at Cortez like a slammed screen door, and Hurricane Milton did not knock politely. Wind worried the pilings, water shouldered into places it had not been invited, and the Florida Gulf Coast learned again that the sea, for all her pearly manners at sunset, can rise up with a scholar’s argument and a mule’s kick. Folks called it a “100-year storm,” which sounds tidy on paper, but there was nothing tidy about it. On the back dock of Star Fish Company, where salt air usually mingles with fried mullet, gull-talk, and the soft clack of working boats, my RhondaK painted mermaid table met the weather head-on. I had painted her in July 2024, bright-tailed and blue-hearted, made for laughter, elbows, paper baskets, and the kind of conversations that start with “Well, honey,” and end somewhere near philosophy.

Mermaid July 2024:

Mermaid October 2024.

Cortez has a memory longer than any tourist brochure, and Star Fish Company’s back dock carries that memory in boards, bait buckets, nets, and the noble perfume of fish both fresh and fried. My mermaid table belonged there because she was never meant to be precious in the fussy parlor sense. She was made to serve. Children could point at her scales. Tired captains could rest a wrist on her painted sea. Visitors could eat shrimp over her smiling face and never know that a woman with paint on her hands had whispered a little blessing into the varnish. “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life,” Picasso said, though I suspect a Cortez version might add, “and occasionally the tartar sauce, too.” That is the academic truth dressed in a southern apron: beauty must be sturdy enough to sit with supper.

After Milton passed, I heard the news of the damage with that particular sinking feeling known to makers, mothers, mechanics, and anyone who has ever loved a thing into being. A table is wood, hardware, paint, and sealant, yes, but this one had also become a small public character, part mermaid and part marina gossip. She had watched plates slide across her top. She had listened to dock laughter rise and fall with the tide. Damage, when it touches something handmade, feels personal because the hand remembers every curve. I could see where my brush had made her hair move like current, where I had coaxed cheek and tail into some bright companionship, where July heat had leaned on my shoulders while I worked. Milton rattled all of that. Still, ruin is a word I use carefully. A cracked thing may be telling a longer story.

Some people expect artists to weep beautifully over loss, perhaps beneath Spanish moss, with a quote from Faulkner tucked in one pocket and grief in the other. I do not object to a proper weep. It has its uses. Yet my first honest instinct was to laugh, not because the storm was small, and not because the damage did not matter, but because laughter is how my people keep from handing the devil a chair. The Florida Gulf Coast has always known this strange arithmetic: one storm takes, a neighbor brings a casserole, somebody finds a missing crab trap two streets over, and by sundown a joke has sprouted right beside the heartbreak. My mermaid table, scraped and shaken, seemed to grin back at me as if to say, “Well, RhondaK, I have been through weather now. Paint me wiser.” That is when I knew the story had not ended on the dock.

Laughter, for me, is not denial. It is carpentry for the spirit. It braces the weak places while repair gets underway. When Hurricane Milton rattled my mermaid table, I chose laughter over ruin because the choice itself felt like a fresh coat of courage. I will study the scars, sand what must be sanded, repaint what calls for color, and let a few marks remain if they speak with dignity. A folk artist knows that a perfect surface can be mighty dull, while a weathered one may carry scripture without opening a Bible. Down at Star Fish Company, where the back dock still belongs to tide, appetite, and plainspoken grace, that mermaid and I have both learned something worth keeping. Storms may bruise the paint, but they do not get the last word. Around here, the last word is often laughter, and it comes with salt on its lips.