Hurricane Ike taught me that the sum of the parts is not greater than the whole, contrary to what the old saying would have us believe. We like to think that if we take care of the parts (individuals) then the whole (community) will benefit. But more often than not the parts are sacrificed for the good of the whole.

A few days after the storm, I walked down Bayou Shore Drive, taking in the devastation. Our house remained intact, but many of our neighbors’ homes had gaping holes where walls once stood. Their belongings scattered across yards, as though the houses had involuntarily coughed up their contents after Ike’s pummeling. Only one family in the neighborhood escaped damage. Their house burned down several months before the hurricane. Its replacement, only partially constructed, sat 16 feet in the air atop pilings. Ike’s winds didn’t displace one board. I felt sure that skeleton of a house represented the future for our neighborhood. All of the houses so close to English Bayou would surely be required to rebuild on pilings, I thought.

Of course, I realized it would be expensive to elevate every house. I knew from the estimates my husband and I got for our repairs how much cheaper it would be to put the house back as it was, on the ground. But we couldn’t imagine going through another Ike. We knew we would have to sacrifice in the short term, by paying more to rebuild, in order to protect ourselves in the future.

I thought city officials would feel the same way.

It would be more expensive and take longer for the city to recover if officials required people with the most flood damage to elevate. But those who did would never have to fear storm surge again, and the city would be less likely to have widespread plummeting property values and abandoned houses.

That short-term pain, long-term gain seemed like the best recovery strategy for everyone.

But city officials decided they couldn’t take the risk of losing residents who didn’t have the money to pay for elevations. They opted for the easiest short-term solution: Let people rebuild at ground level and hope the next monster storm doesn’t come along for another hundred years.

Most homeowners, anxious to get their lives back, agreed with that decision. Rebuilding at ground level seemed to be best for the whole community. But those who did are still vulnerable to the next storm.

Is that really best for them?

As we get closer to Huricane Ike’s second anniversary, I’ve been thinking about what I learned covering, living though and writing a book about the third costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. Over the next few weeks, I’ll share some of those lessons here, in no particular order.

I spilled a lot of ink in The Galveston County Daily News and now in Infinite Monsteron what Hurricane Ike took away. Homes, family heirlooms, treasured keepsakes and, in some cases, lives. I still think about the things I don’t have any more. I ransacked my kitchen the other day looking for a cheese grater that I finally remembered “went swimming,” as my husband likes to say. Even the feedback we’ve gotten here and on our Facebook fan page has been heavily weighted with loss.

But the overwhelming theme of my Ike experience has been what the storm gave me, not what it took.

Hurricane Ike gave me people. Its floodwaters washed away everything I could live without and helped me focus on what I had left - my friendships.

In the bleak days immediately following the storm, I forged life-long friendships with the two women who suffered through it with me. I worked with them for more than a year without really getting to know them. But as we sat in the dark and talked about what we’d seen and heard before the sun went down, I discovered two people who inspired me, encouraged me and made me laugh.

When the police finally dragged away the blockade at the base of the causeway, two of my best friends came to help my husband dig through the muck that filled our house, looking for anything to salvage. They did the dirty and painful work I couldn’t do because I was roving the island telling other people’s stories. My friends even cleaned out the stomach-turning contents of my refrigerator. They didn’t have any damage. They didn’t even have to come back right away, but they did, just to be with us.

When we finally moved back to the island, two months after the storm, we rented an apartment in a donwtown building where several of our good friends already lived. It was like being in a TV sitcom. We shared Thanksgiving, Christmas and every weekend for the next seven months with them. We built bonds in that place we never would have living miles apart.

I have living without the things Ike took. But I wouldn’t trade them for what I gained in return.