Yesterday we closed the hurricane shutters since we were told that Hurricane Isaias was on its way to us. Today we’re still waiting. I went out for my morning walk before the rain supposedly begins to arrive in a couple hours. That gave me time to think about hurricanes of the past.

I’ve lived in Florida for 40 years so I’ve been through my share of hurricanes. My first recollection of a storm was in the late 1980’s. Richard and I would go to the store and buy pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, pick our favorite, get a spoon and climb into bed to watch the storm go by. We didn’t get the flashlights out, no one I knew even had shutters. Sometimes we might put masking tape on the windows as a precaution, but mainly we did a lot of nothing.

Then Hurricane Andrew struck in 1992. I can still see the face of the woman who said, “Where the hell is the cavalry?” That storm was devastating and people suffered immensely because we had no safeguards or backup plans in place. After that things started to change in terms of hurricane preparation.

In 2004 Richard and I took a trip to Washington DC. We got a call while in the Holocaust Museum to come pick up our dog from the kennel. That was embarrassing. He had to stay alone as Hurricane Jeanne pummeled through. We had to stay an extra night in our suite at the Willard Hotel since the airport was closed. Poor us.

Wilma came through in 2005 and we were without power for 9 days. But I have to say the worst storm we experienced was Irma in 2017. The house even with all the shutters closed, rocked and rolled all night long. It was a Cat 4, the strongest I’d ever tried to sleep through.

So here we are with Isaias. We can’t pronounce the name and she is unsure of what she wants to be, hurricane or tropical storm. So here we sit in the dark with all the shutters closed and as Richard says, he farts harder than the wind we are going to get from Isaias. Even though we now take all the precautions we can for a storm, batteries, flashlights, water; one tradition stays in place. I got mint chocolate chip ice cream and Richard got dark cherry chocolate.