As I type these words a gentle rain falls softly on the world outside my window, unlike the rain last night, that one tip-tapped on the roof until the middle of the morning. We haven’t had a good soaking rain yet, one fierce enough to get this Florida girl to open an umbrella, but there’s a hurricane on the way, so it’s coming. The anticipation is hard for me, the anxiety, the questions no one answer, and the powerful reminder that human beings are not as powerful as we imagine.
I’ve lost track of how many hurricanes I’ve survived. I remember the bad ones. Frances hit just before DragonCon, causing the most surreal sixteen hour drive of my life. Andrew ripped away houses leaving brown scars you could see from the highway no matter how fast you went. Charley chewed through roofs and every other house wore a blue tarp for months. Erin arrived the day a surgeon removed my wisdom teeth. With limited water and no electric, I developed an infection and passed the storm hallucinating with fever.
Despite the hardships, I’ve always appreciated the raw power of the storm, the beauty of it. My father and I would head to the beach after the all clear, searching for treasure churned up by the waves, watching the wind rip the foam off the surf. One our way home we’d stop and help people. One year I helped my favorite pizza joint take down the heavy plywood that kept their windows safe. Before the storm came we helped neighbors batten down the hatches (literally) and put away possible projectiles like lawn furniture and ornaments. After it hit, folks with generators run extensions cords to refrigerators down the block, and people smart enough to have a gas water heater offer hot showers. Communities can come together in a magical way after a hurricane.
Hurricane preparations always make me rearrange my priorities. Mentally packing my ‘go box’, a five gallon plastic bin I’d grab in the event of evacuation, makes me realize what matters. None of my clothes are important enough, nothing from the kitchen except food. The electronics only matter because of the things on them – family photos, manuscripts, scanned copies of documents we’d need to file insurance claims. The jewelry maybe, especially the few things I’ve inherited, but if it meant getting out in time or being trapped I’d leave it behind. I’d pack my quilts if there was room but even my prized 1938 sewing machine could be replaced. Hurricanes remind us what matters most.
Someday I’d like to write a story about a hurricane, stealing pieces from my childhood like the way we went outside to play as the calm eye of the storm passed over us or the chemical smell of rainwater purified with exactly eight drops of bleach in each gallon. At age four I struggled to count the drops exactly, at fourteen I poured the much more dangerous lamp oil with confidence. Now I’m the one searching for batteries and picking out canned food, closely watching the forecast to see where it will land. It’s hard, but not impossible. Once you’ve lived through a storm, it becomes a part of you, especially the bad ones. You realize you have it in you to survive, to help others when the sky is falling, and move forward when the storm passes.