The subtle beep of her cellphone provided the most joyful noise for Pye Parson in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Parson fled her home in Waveland, Miss., along with her then-husband and 5-year-old son, Quen, the day before Katrina made landfall. Once the devastation became evident, she sent a text message to everyone she knew who lived in the region, asking one simple question: “Are you OK?”

It took three agonizingly quiet days before cell service in the area started working again and Parson was able to receive any replies. Then her phone began to beep, and one by one Parson heard back from those she had tried to contact.

Pye Parson from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.

“I’ll never forget being isolated and not knowing if anybody had made it, because a bunch of our friends had stayed,” Parson recalled. “And then that cellphone would beep. ‘We’re OK. Where are you?’ It was like that all day for several days… Every beep I got on my phone, I knew somebody was alive.”

But in the process, Parson also learned that her home as well as her business in nearby Bay St. Louis, Miss., had been destroyed. “Within 24 hours, the life I knew was all gone,” she said.

Determined to find some semblance of stability for her young son as quickly as possible, Parson briefly returned to her hometown of Lanett to live with her mother, and then came to Birmingham where her sister lived. Within weeks, Quen was enrolled at Advent Episcopal School.

“They just opened their arms to us and took him in,” Parson said. “He was my reason for not really focusing on what had happened. I was like, ‘OK, how do we move forward?’ He had his little life to get back on track, and that’s what I focused on.”

Parson said after living temporarily with a family in Mountain Brook, they moved into a house in the Crestwood neighborhood. Before long, Parson opened up a garden store in the Crestwood Shopping Center (she later ran Crestwood Coffee Co.), and Birmingham became their new home.

“Life just sort of moved on its own,” Parson said. “There was just nothing to go back to. I was here, this is a great place, and everybody was supportive and helping. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

“Everybody bent over backward with anything we needed. The generosity you saw and the people who helped, it was an amazing outreach of so many people. Everybody was really wonderful. And they still are.”

For the past five years, Parson has worked as a real estate agent, focusing primarily on the Avondale, Highland Park and Forest Park neighborhoods. She said it is a profession that has taken on special meaning to her since Katrina.

“I realize how hard it is to lose everything and not have a home of your own,” Parson said. “So now I want to help people find their home.

“When you lose everything, you find that it opens the world up to you, and you can reinvent yourself. I took full advantage of that.”

As we approach the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating landfall from the Gulf of Mexico, Alabama NewsCenter is sharing stories of those who came to Alabama to put down new roots and build new lives and businesses.