At 1:29, a.m. the power goes out, cutting off in mid-sentence one of the hurricane experts on Weather Channel. Flashlight in hand, I search for the remote, thinking about how – when the power does come back on at some indeterminate future time – I will be stuck with Jim Cantore and friends because I have no idea how to change the channel without pointing and clicking.
By 3:00 a.m., the house is already so hot that I have thrown back the covers, not even a sheet between me and whatever danger might exist in the night. The wind is throwing itself against the outside walls in gusts of up to 70 miles per hour. Every so often the walls creek like when you break the spine of a book. There is no chance of my falling asleep. I don’t know if I have ever felt more alone.
At 4:15 a.m., the phone dings. “Okay at Sandhill?” At 4:40 a.m., it dings again. “Are you ok?” The darkness feels a little less heavy, but the wind continues to howl and the house continues to moan. I imagine what it is like outside. I imagine the does who live in our woods encircling their fawns in the crater-like beds they make along fencerows. Are their hearts racing? Are they, too, longing for daylight?
At 6:30 a.m., as the sky begins to lighten, I raise the blinds and stare through the gray mist. I can see the outline of Daddy’s house, his empty house. I, for some reason, tiptoe to the back door and look out at my beautiful, beloved sawtooth oaks. They are still standing, but it is as though an egg beater has attacked their foliage – holes where full limbs once reached toward the sky, broken branches dangling just out of reach from the ground.
The sound of my brother’s UTV draws close. Together we ride the farm, assessing the damage – part of a fence folded over, a couple of sheets of metal roofing on the equipment shelter flapping in the wind, and lots and lots of downed trees. Later, we will join our neighbors in clearing our two-mile dirt road. A tractor, a chain saw, and muscles make a big difference. Only when vehicles can once again make their way to the highway, do any of us catch our breaths.
It is Tuesday as I write this. I still don’t have power.
Over the last five days, though, I have seen the best of us. I have charged my phone and filled my cooler with ice at the church I call home, a church that miraculously, when everything around it lost power did not. I have been fed homemade muffins, given a gloriously hot shower, and regaled with stories that almost made me forget by friends I have known since elementary school. I have been welcomed into the home of my nephew and his family where I slept under a handmade quilt and saw Owen teach his cousin Case how to do the zoomies.
I have rolled down my car window and given a thumbs up to passing utility trucks and continued down the interstate crying because I am so full of gratitude, but also because I know – from Helene and, before that, Debby and Matthew and all the others – that we could be this way all the time if we would but take a breath, pay attention, let go of thinking that we can be, do, accomplish anything without each other.
I don’t know when I will again sleep in my own bed, walk my own road, sit on my own porch and gasp in delight at the beauty of the world. I don’t know when the fence will be repaired, the severed limbs carted away, the road to Sandhill cleared of all debris. I don’t know when I can stop worrying about my friends in North Carolina or if that whirling circle of orange and red and chartreuse taunting us from the Gulf of Mexico will become Isaac and hit us while we are down.
What I do know is that today I am freshly showered and bracingly cool, surrounded by people I love and I don’t know that I need more than that.
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