Hurricane Irene

Late yesterday afternoon, we started getting the first raindrops that marked the onset of Hurricane Irene's path through my state. We had prepared as much as possible for us to ride out the storm. The kidlets were (not) sleeping all in one room on inflatable mattresses, and they thought it was fun. My husband thought I was overreacting in my concern, but he genially went along for the ride anyway. My state in general appeared to be very worried about the potential for devastation, and we did our best to take the dire warnings to heart.

I decided to stay up fairly late reading a book. My philosophy was that I needed to be extremely tired before attempting to sleep once the wind started increasing. I have no idea what time I finally crawled into bed, but I do know that I only lasted a few minutes before jumping up at the sound of sirens in the distance. I checked on the basement to see if all was set to try and prevent flooding, but water had already started seeping into one portion of our floor. I woke up Pig to ask him how to operate the shop vac, since I had never done so before, and I still wanted him to sleep. Instead, he came down to the basement with me, demonstrated how our shop vac worked, then dug out the one area of our French drain that seemed to not be draining while I suctioned away the water. Eventually, he agreed to go back to bed while I kept watch over the basement.

Since we still had power, I decided to go online while I waited for my half-hour checks on the basement. Others, too, were keeping an electronic vigil while they dealt with their own flooding issues. At some point, a number of us admitted how freaked out we were getting over the increasing wind, torrential downpours, and the tree branches and trees that were coming down around us. Thankfully, the only major branch that fell near us did not hit our house. Instead, it leaned against the telephone wires strung across the top of our driveway as it rested on the ground. Granted, I do not know what type of wire it was actually touching. Perhaps it was phones, cable, electricity, or some other randomly unidentified wire. Whatever the case may be, I was not about to head out in a hurricane to see if I could electrocute myself on the darn thing. It looked awful in the dark, and I dreaded the light of day and the potential to see just how bad things were.

Sometime around four in the morning, I made the executive decision to move the kidlets down to the basement. We still had power and there had been no more leaks since our midnight-ish experience with the shop vac. The winds were what concerned me, and I wanted the kidlets a little more protected in case the tree in front of our house decided to join the branch that was already down. I informed Pig of my decision, watched him roll back over and go to sleep, then woke my barely-fallen-asleep offspring to make that move.

The kidlets were at first a bit hazy about why Mommy was waking them up before dawn, and they stumbled through a bathroom routine before grabbing their prepacked toy bags and heading downstairs. Once there, and once again on the inflatable mattresses I dragged down with us, they proceeded to have a blast. They played on electronic gadgets, colored, ate breakfast, read books, and found countless ways to amuse themselves in their new environment. At one point, Rooster gasped in horror while I was trying not to doze on one of those mattresses, and I sat up in a panic thinking that the water in the basement might have started back up again. It took me a moment to process that the emergency she was panicking over was, "Your underwear is showing, Mommy!" Gotta love kidlets.

Throughout this basement playtime, I was exchanging a number of text messages and Facebook posts and comments with friends and family elsewhere. I started to realize just how good we had it as I heard of people who had downed trees, no electricity, flooding, and whose possible escape routes had been blocked by water or emergency crews on every side. As the pictures started to flood the Internet, I was more grateful than ever that our house appears to sit on a little island in a section of town that rarely floods, even though the water from flooding down the street from us came up to my next door neighbor's house. An inch of water in one corner of the basement cannot possibly compare to looking out one's window and barely seeing the roof of one's car over the top of the water while trying to bail out several feet of water in the one's basement.

Around seven-thirty in the morning, I woke up a groggy Pig and informed him it was time to face the day. He clumped downstairs with the rest of us and took over kidlet-watching duty so I could pass out for a little while. The ringing phone startled me awake after an hour or so, but by then, the weather wasn't nearly as horrific, and we decided it was time to brave our main floor once more.

Larry, Moe, Curly, and a few of their friends made their appearance once the rain stopped. Those poor folks must have been working all night by the time they removed that tree branch from the wires, but it seemed almost like a comedy routine to watch them work. Their method of branch removal was to try and cut off the supporting branches that held up the heaviest branch. That did not work. Then they tried making partial cuts and kicking at the tree. One guy tried to pull the lower branches back, and they snapped off and he flew backwards onto the street. That was probably the first time he was off his feet in over twenty-four hours. Finally, they hooked a rope on part of the branch and several of them pulled back until the branch was firmly wedged against the power lines instead of the cable wire on which we believe it had initially been resting. Eventually, they managed to knock it down while loosening a few wires in the process. I lifted up a silent prayer of thanks that they had not electrocuted themselves or knocked the dang thing down onto their heads.

By now, the winds are still giving a random gust, but we are hopeful that the worst of Irene is over. I hope no more branches or trees will fall, and that flooding will start to abate. We hope that homes that have power are able to keep it and that homes without are able to have their power restored. We recognize how very lucky we were to come through Irene as unscathed as we did. So many are much worse off than we are. I know that the kidlets came through the storm just fine. They all objected to sleeping in their own rooms and to not being allowed to play in the basement anymore. Horse claimed it was an exciting adventure, but the storm itself was "boring." Thank God it was.