“God, I look hilarious.” On Thursday afternoon, Marilyn Edwards eyes a photo of herself taken by a Herald photographer on June 22, where she’s wrapped in a comforter and her hair is sticking straight up. “Just like Pebbles from the Flintstones,” says the 66-year-old as she doubles over in laughter.

“My caregiver Laurent and I were walking up the stairwell because the power was out,” she says of the night of June 20, when she somehow missed the evacuation order. “Two days later, my landlady opened the door and found us. She yelled, ‘Hey, you guys are supposed to be gone!’ ”

A few minutes later, the gregarious great-grandmother was sitting on a park bench, her hair mussed and her expression one of great confusion, when a Herald photographer happened by. “I didn’t know where I was going to sleep,” says Edwards, a native Calgarian. “It was scary.”

Edwards was soon whisked off to Acadia Recreation Complex, where she says she was treated like a queen by an army of kind volunteers. “I wish I could find every one of those people and thank them,” she says. “Honestly, it was one of the best times I ever had.”

These past two weeks, Edwards has been playing catch-up with her friends at the Golden Age Club, the nexus of this small inner-city enclave of subsidized seniors apartments.

“This is our social life,” she says of the 400-member club that offers everything from cheap meals and bingo to the computers she plays on most afternoons.

Signs of a neighbourhood coming back to life are evident throughout East Village on this day, as construction crews are busy with the first of the community’s new condo development, along with a new retail venue in the old Simmons Building, one that will house some of the city’s best-known gourmet food purveyors.

For the regulars at the Golden Age Club, though, it’s not quite business as usual. “It’s a bit of a ghost town,” says James Faulkner, the friendly proprietor of the East Village Cafe in the club’s lobby. “Every time a returning resident walks in the door, cheers go up and there are hugs all around.”

Sadly, that isn’t happening often enough for the longtime regulars of this local social hub.

“It’s pretty lonely these days,” says 75-year-old Gloria Campbell, whose East Village Place building was one of the first to welcome back tenants. “I miss all my friends. We don’t even know where some of them ended up — this isn’t a crowd that texts each other or even sends emails.”

To make her point, Campbell points to a 16-storey building across the avenue. “That’s Murdoch Manor, which has more than 300 residents,” she says. “They’re saying the folks that live there might not be able to get back in until mid-August.”

While much of Calgary has moved on post-flood, the seniors of East Village are still, for the most part, dispersed both in the city and around southern Alberta. Some of the 300 or so still displaced have found refuge at other city agencies or with family and friends; as well, a formerly vacant lodge in the town of Bashaw, 230 kilometres northeast of the city, is temporary home for 48, while another 60 have been spending the past few weeks as guests at Olds College.