Pocket's Dark and Stormy Night

During hurricane season I read countless accounts of destructive storms and survival.  I prayed for my friends, and I thanked God that I was not in the path of the storm.  I am a nervous pup on sunny days; I didn’t know what I would do if wicked weather arrived.

On Sunday night I got a taste of a tropical storm, and I did not like it in the least.

As scary bad storms go, this one wasn’t excessive.  The winds topped out at 67 miles per hour, and we got five inches of rain in a twelve hour period.  Many of my friends have gone through worse, and I am sure they faced it braver than I did.

We live in a tiny home held together with a few loose screws and anchored to the ground by a worn chain.  Storms really hate small houses.  When you see pictures of neighborhoods destroyed by the wind they are usually areas like ours.  I live in fear that the wind is going to pick up our house and blow it away like  Dorothy’s abode.

The storm didn’t bother me when I was sitting in the living room but when we moved to the bedroom, which was`taking the brunt of the intense southern wind,  the storm intensified, and the house began to shake, so did I.  Adding to the tension was an endless baseball game where the pitchers gave up runs with equal frequency that their hitters plated them.

The wind shook the house, and I lifted my head and looked around nervously then settled down.  A batter hit the white ball out of the park where no one could chase it, the announcers yelled, and I got up, did the spin around, and sat.  Rain lashed the side of the house, and I climbed on Daddy trying to get to higher ground until he put me down.

The game ended, which was good, and then the worst possible thing happened.  For just a second the lights went out.

I can’t explain why the power going out, even for a second, bothers me so much, but it does.  My parents were planning on going to sleep, but I was in the midst of a full body shaking panic attack.  Daddy told Mommy to go to bed, and he picked me up and walked around the house with me trying to calm me, but the winds were blowing harder, and the rain was lashing with more intensity.

We looked towards the backyard and saw that two of the yard rocking chairs were blowing across the grass.  Daddy put me down and went into the storm to rescue the furniture.  I watched in horror as he wrestled the chair into the house like Gilligan trying to get a drunken Skipper from his hammock during a typhoon.  

He arrived back inside, wet and cold.  He decided bed would be best and we climbed in together, but I was in no mood to settle down. I walked up and down the bed then jumped off, several times.  Daddy finally gave up and sat up with me reading until I finally settled down and went to sleep at 4:00 AM.

I woke up glued to my Dad's leg.  It was still stormy, so our garden day was canceled, but I didn’t mind, I needed sleep.

Something had kept me up all night.