You do what you can to prepare, and then the choice is sitting up all night having cardiac events every time leaves hit the window, or just go the hell to sleep and deal with everything in the morning.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a Florida native with extensive hurricane experience. Chances are, if it was hurricane above a category 3 that hit Florida between the years of 1978 and now, I have some memory of it, however vague. I actually slept through quite a few, since there’s really nothing you can do but ride it out. You do what you can to prepare, and then the choice is sitting up all night having cardiac events every time leaves hit the window, or just go the hell to sleep and deal with everything in the morning. It’s basically a form of Christmas that no one looks forward to, presided over by a big, soppy ball of wind and rain that leaves wreckage instead of presents.
Matthew was the first serious hurricane I’ve dealt with by myself. It was pretty daunting, considering I know exactly what hurricanes are capable of. Some hurricanes can cause tornados – 2004’s Charley, if I remember correctly, had something like 70 tornadoes, total. Some of them left literal trails of destruction, marked by giant billboards twisted around like pretzels or cars flipped onto their roofs. I’ve already talked about some of the stuff I saw in Miami after Andrew, and what my father saw after Hugo. And of course, there was the most well-known hurricane of all in recent memory: Katrina.
As a child I have a memory of going outside after a hurricane and finding our holly tree- an old tree with a trunk about 4 feet across- snapped off at the base. Just broken, the white heartwood gleaming in the sun.
So I took the news seriously and prepared.
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