Rain thrashes against a small, wooden bungalow where the floors slope at strange angles. At unpredictable intervals, the neighborhood hills light up with strobe-like flare and the thunder drops like artillery.
I am well accustomed to thunderstorms. Especially lately. But there is something about navigating one in a new place that intensifies the experience. The terrain that lights up is unfamiliar. The shadows are foreign. The echoes of thunder are bouncing off of trees and houses you’ve never seen before. As I listen to the sounds of the weather outside and the alerts about the weather on my phone, I half expect the storm to come inside. I don’t know this house. How do I know it won’t?
Maybe it is this storm or maybe it’s this morning’s walk in the Oakdale Cemetery, but I got to thinking. And it’s long past time to sleep, but I can’t stop myself from thinking. About storms. And storm prep.
I have been sitting here considering what makes one storm more frightening than the next and what makes a storm scary in the first place. I came up with a few things.
Where you are matters. When I was on a 35 foot sailboat with my friend and her dad, I was on the storm’s turf and in the most volatile spot on earth at that moment in time. I felt a little differently about that approaching storm versus the one I watched hit the rented bungalow tonight.
How you prepare matters. When you build a house in Tornado Alley, you can prepare by building a storm cellar. In hurricane season along any coastline, you can prepare by building a hurricane kit and by sandbagging. When there is no weathering the storm, sometimes all you can do is run. I once sandbagged my house for a hurricane that dropped less rain than I bathed my babies in. I was real mad when I had to dispose of 300 filled sandbags. What I wasn’t was scared. I was prepared for that storm.
The intensity of the storm matters. Some storms are worse than others. Some storms are bigger than I am, or bigger than my house or my hurricane kit.
Your focus matters. Where I’m trying to go as a storm approaches is my focus. If I have an outdoor concert, or a ballgame, or a flight to take, I don’t want to see an ominous forecast. A black cloud becomes the worst kind of news. But if I have nowhere to be, a solid roof over my head, a book, a dog, and a content kid around, I would gladly order a storm from a weather vending machine and turn it all the way up.
As I lie here, I can still hear the rain, though the thunder has faded to a rumble. My low rumble is another guy’s artillery. The storm has moved away.
I am not thinking about physical storms this moment. I’m making connections in my mind; thinking about the things that upend me in my life. Thinking about the things I could have done to change my location or my prep so that those things might have been a drizzle and not a devastating flash flood.
I can’t do anything about the fact that I sandbagged my house for Hurricane Georges, which did not even wink at us, and did nothing to prepare for Irma, which did. And I can’t change that I allowed a free PlayStation into my house when Andrew was 10., or that I was bad at chore assignments and enforcement when my kids were tiny. But I can do today. And the future is still out there. It’s summer and the school year will be sitting in my ill-prepared lap before I am ready to acknowledge it. I will have kids in grades 6,8,10, and 12 this year. There will be storms all along the way and life is going to change dramatically in the next year or two. It will take 5 friends, a husband, and a very, very good guidance counselor to lead me through the Senior Year Labyrinth and a therapist to get me over it when it is past. And then I’ll be on to the next thing. Don’t regret, Missy. Do. Put on your rubber shoes and start walking.
That’s a lot of hooey that came up because I am watching the lightning signal threateningly outside a North Carolina window. It’s like the devil doing morse code with a flashlight. Sinister. As the storm fades and a soft rain continues, I think about this specific storm and how I prepared for it. I have only one regret and it’s a big one:
I left my shoes on the porch to dry out.
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