Mr. Shiyou returns to working on the all-but-destroyed house of a beloved 89-year-old neighbor. Ms. Shiyou, meanwhile, recreates in her mind the home they shared for 10 years and lost nine months ago.

The Kia Sephia and the Dodge pickup in the driveway. The curio cabinet, with all those angels collected by her late mother. The framed family photographs. The children's encyclopedias. Her set of dishes, whose pattern was, was —

"God, what color was my kitchen set?" Ms. Shiyou asks, her voice breaking. She says it will come to her, but it doesn't.

Lives Suspended on Gulf Coast, Crammed Into 240 Square Feet
By DAN BARRY

LAKESHORE, Miss., June 12 — If you were to fly over rural Hancock County here, you would see more than 9,000 of them, white rectangles clumped in sun-bleached parks and scattered in piney woods like pieces of a trashed picket fence. Pick any one, and contained within that FEMA trailer are lives in claustrophobic suspension.

Paulette Shiyou invites you into her family's trailer with a natural hospitality that has remained intact. Her husband, Hugh, offers a can of beer, and her son, Cody, itching to show you his card collection, his rock collection, his pocketknife, kicks off his sneakers.

And suddenly, in this tight trailer of 240 square feet, an 11-year-old boy's shoes loom like ottomans.

"I'm constantly yelling at him because you're always tripping over him," Ms. Shiyou says, scolding but smiling. "And he yells at me to turn the lights out."

Cody defends himself by nodding toward the droning television set that sits near the only door, about five feet from his cubbyhole bunk bed. "I'll be going to bed," he says, "and she'll be watching TV and have all these lights on."

As the television set gabs and a boy complains and a mother justifies her liberal use of lights by saying she just cannot tolerate darkness, not since the storm, it seems that in a FEMA trailer even words take up space.