Be safe, dear friends. I'm willing you my blue skies

It’s strange not being anywhere near this hurricane and all the people we love are right in the path. If we hadn’t moved, we’d be preparing as well – although I’d still have to go to work and pat wouldn’t and wouldn’t get paid. So we’d both be grumpy about it. During Irene, when they evacuated downtown, we had a make-shift newsroom in a hotel conference room. I worked 13 hours or something straight. It was awful. I remember watching the sky turn green. I remember a squirrel taking shelter on our balcony and we both looked at each other more afraid about what was coming than the fact that I was huge and he was small; that we weren’t even the same species; that under any other circumstances we would not ever be this close to each other.
But it wasn’t the hurricane that devastated our area – it was the flood after. So much rainfall north of us in Vermont and New York and it all ran down the Susquahanna through our town. We waited for hours to see if the levy would withstand all that pressure, the water lapping over the edge, the walls cracking and all the homeowners in the floodplain holding their breaths.
That was a little over a year ago and while they’ve made a few repairs to the levy, I’m afraid of all the things they haven’t been able to fix yet. It seems highly unlikely the system could withstand another flood like that. But the water level being lower than it was last year at the time of the hurricane Irene is a big factor.
Yesterday, while all of our friends’ cities were shutting down, schools closed, bread and milk were emptied off shelves, pat and I sat by our pool and drank mimosas in the sun. Talk about a climate change. I even had a friend say: That’s BULLSHIT. We’re all preparing for the apocalypse and you’re getting a drunk and a tan! Which was true, but in all honesty, I kind of want to be there! There’s something really awe-inspiring to see a storm like that. You pray no one gets hurt and the damage is minimal and people are safe and when all that is said and done, when you’re hunkered down in your house and the power goes off and the wind and the rain is pounding around you, you have nothing but respect for something that can make you feel so small.