To the untrained eye, the flood-ravaged river district in Clyde appears to back to normal. There’s no more water in the street for one. The appliances and oil tanks that once littered yards are largely gone. Mounds of demolished building materials no longer line the sidewalks. There are cars in the driveways.

But a close inspection shows that some cars are rusted and haven’t been moved in months. Houses are just empty frames. The town that seems sleepy is at times downright eerie.

Many flood victims still lack a stable home. They still don’t have furniture. And they have yet to recover from the financial hit.

“It’s a long way from being normal for a lot of them,” said Joan Sammons with the Haywood County Baptist Association. The Haywood County Baptist Association continues to house and feed teams of volunteers making pilgrimages to the county to help with the recovery.

But Sammons fears that volunteers and resources for the remaining flood recovery here in Haywood County will evaporate with the nation’s attention focused on the Gulf Coast.

Jessie Mae Brown, 84, of Clyde, just moved back into her house last month thanks to volunteers with the Baptist Association who rebuilt it for her. But the neighborhood isn’t the same.

“To see the houses like they are and a lot being torn down, it’s depressing I guess you could say,” Brown said.

Brown has spent the past month unpacking her old life one box at a time and setting up house. Following the flood, which Brown likens to a big washing machine swirling everything inside her house around and around, she stacked possessions she thought could be salvaged into a big tractor-trailer.

Her family will bring her a box or two at a time to work on. She didn’t wash everything when it got thrown in that tractor trailer a year ago, so she has her work cut out now. Armed with bleach and rubber gloves, she cleans everything three times before setting it up in the house.

“I’ve heard a lot of people have had to go through counseling and I can imagine. It is depressing. One day you have everything and the next day you have nothing,” Brown said.

Brown remembers the first flood of last year like it was yesterday. She had gone shopping at Wal-Mart and bought a teddy bear for her granddaughter. Brown gave her granddaughter a teddy bear every Christmas. When she went off to college at Western Carolina University, Brown didn’t think she would still want teddy bears. But she did, and told her grandmother so when one Christmas went by and she didn’t get one. Brown came home and put the teddy bear still in its plastic bag on a high shelf where it escaped the flood waters.

“I gave it to her for Christmas and told her it’d been through the flood,” Brown said. Sitting on the porch of her new home, tears welling up in her eyes, Brown said to tell the world that she’s doing just fine.