Rosemary Jesionowski couldn’t contain her excitement upon landing a job teaching photography at McNeese State University. One month after moving to Lake Charles, the Category 4 Hurricane Laura left the city and Southwest Louisiana wrecked.

It was a scenario she was all too familiar with.

Jesionowski first came to McNeese in 2005 as a visiting lecturer. Growing up in Colorado and Ohio, she described herself at the time as being “very midwestern,” having never experienced hurricanes. Hurricane Katrina made landfall two weeks after she arrived, followed by Hurricane Rita in late September. Before those storms, she was told she’d be fine, as long as she was north of Interstate 10.

Before Rita’s landfall, Jesionowski and her husband, Jake Urbanski, evacuated to Kinder with one of her work colleagues. The damage to McNeese’s campus was severe, with no immediate chance of resuming classes. She and Jake embarked on a road trip for two months.

After Rita, Jesionowski thought the chances of living through another destructive hurricane were slim. Still, she was more physically and mentally prepared for Hurricane Laura.

“For Rita, we didn’t even have any bottled water,” she said. “We were just completely unprepared. For Laura, I had gallons of water and got food that wasn’t going to go bad in the fridge.”

Jesionowski prepared to ride out Laura, but instead evacuated with a co-worker to a home in Crowley. As the storm bore down, a water oak tree fell on the roof. The hurricane also let Jesionowski test her “weather prowess,” listening throughout the night for the train-like noise that accompanies tornadoes.

Jesionowski returned to Lake Charles two days after Laura and stayed with a work colleague before going back to her damaged apartment. She later spent two weeks in Richmond, Va., a city where she had spent 15 years teaching before moving to Lake Charles.

The sense of community immediately after Hurricane Laura was undeniable, Jesionowski said. After navigating the debris-filled roadways, she parked on a street near a neighbor and began checking on others in the area.

“I think I met almost everybody on my street in that week right after the hurricane,” she said. “It was everybody kind of constantly checking in on each other. It was this universal experience that we were all going through at the same time.”

Jesionowski said she took plenty of photographs immediately after Hurricane Laura.

“I didn’t even know what to photograph; it was so overwhelming,” she said. “I could’ve made a million pictures just on my block.”

One photo that sticks out is when crews finally came and picked up her pile of curbside debris.

“It was such a big, exciting thing,” she said. “I was super fascinated with the agility with which the claw operator swooped up all the debris. So, I grabbed my camera, set it up and made photographs while they were doing it.”

Once the debris was cleared, a man operating the truck came down and offered Jesionowski money for a copy of the photo. She politely declined and gave him a print a few days later.

“He brought me a bottle of wine, he was so excited,” she said.

At the height of the COVID-19 stay-at-home order, Jesionowski used a closet in her apartment as a darkroom. The set up was similar to the one her father set up when she was a teenager. They used the space to make pinhole photographs, which don’t require a lens.

“I was always kind of interested in the magic of it,” she said of photography.

Jesionowski began college as a dance major, but an injury forced her to switch to photography.

“I just needed an excuse to change majors, and that was the perfect excuse,” she said.

Jesionowski had no plans to teach upon starting graduate school, but she became a teaching assistant because there was a full tuition waiver.

“On the very first day I came home after teaching and was like, ‘That is awesome,’ ” she said. “To be able to share the knowledge that I have and see the look in (students’) faces when they discover something, that was it. I was sold.”

The years haven’t dulled the exhilaration Jesionowski gets from teaching darkroom and digital photography.

“I’ve guided people to their own discoveries,” she said. “I’m not the kind of person that just lectures and delivers information. I’m like, ‘This is a big group project, and I’m here to give you some guidance.”