Life Returns to Normal-ish

It looks like today may be more of a normal Saturday than I was expecting.  I checked the 5 a.m. advisory from the National Hurricane Center, and we are no longer in the cone of possibility.  Hurrah!

Of course, we may still get some heavy rain.  We will now be on the dirty side of the storm, if there's a storm moving north.   If we get enough rain for flooding, which often happens during heavy thunderstorms that last over an hour, we have sandbags.

I had been feeling proud of myself for getting to Home Depot early on Thursday to get sand for the sandbags.  Late yesterday afternoon, I discovered we hadn't gotten enough.  So off we went to Home Depot.  Happily, it wasn't too crazy.  Yesterday we were still in the possible path of the storm, and it was after 5, when many people get off work, so I thought it might be just this side of chaos.

We came home and poured sand into the bags.  Since we were sweaty and dirty, we planted some more seeds in pots.

If we ever do have the kind of storm where we need to move everything that could be a flying missile, we will have a lot of work in front of us.  Happily, we don't have to spend the week-end thinking about that.

By the time we were done, the last light was leaving the sky.  We opened a bottle of wine and took it back outside--there was a lovely breeze, and the humidity felt lower.  We took a swim.  How lovely it is to take a swim after hurricane preparations!

Ten years ago, life would have been different.  We'd have been in the condo that we still owned after the death of my spouse's mom in April, returning to our house to do hurricane clean up from Hurricane Katrina.  Ten years ago today, Hurricane Katrina would have been coming ashore at New Orleans.  And then, the levees broke, which did the true damage.

Happily, this week will be different for me.  My hurricane prep is done, and does not require a lot of undoing--the sandbags can be stored as sandbags.  Hopefully the storm will fall into tiny shreds that bring rain but not much destruction.  Hopefully the island of Domenica, so far the worst hit, can recover quickly.

I've spent the week working on a poem inspired by this hurricane prep, and I started thinking about all the poems I once wrote that have hurricane imagery.  This morning I went through some old files and found some poems I only vaguely remembered from my earliest days of writing post-grad school poetry.  Not bad, not bad at all . . . although some future grad school would likely wonder if my marriage was really that bad. 

I used hurricane imagery as metaphor for troubling relationships, but those relationships weren't mine.  Long ago, I wrote in first person, regardless, because I thought first person gave the poems more powerful impact.

Perhaps in days to come, I'll post an old poem.  We can compare them to my more recent poems.  But since this post is getting long, and I'm soon headed to spin class, let me finish now. 

Headed to spin class--yes, a normal Saturday seems to be in store.  For that, I am profoundly grateful.