I don’t mean to sound over-dramatic, but I really feel lucky. I don’t mean to make light of the situation. It’s just that people have told me this in jest. Not because I made it through Hurricane Matthew, but because I made it through two nights in a stuffy hotel room with my mother. With her dog. Without electricity. With only a couple of cold chicken fingers and the few sandwiches I grabbed from work.
And maybe most of all, because my wife didn’t kill me for staying with my mother, and not with her and my daughter.
It certainly wasn’t the way I planned it. Looking back on it, I’m still not sure how it worked out that way. But I do remember a phone call one early morning, right before Matthew started huffing and puffing our way.
It was my mother: “Brian! The hotel just called to say they’re canceling my reservation! They’re evacuating the city!” (My mother talks with a Southern accent, but she is Cuban. And Cubans talk in exclamation points!)
“That’s what I’ve been telling you!” I told her. “Didn’t I tell you! You don’t evacuate to an evacuation zone!” (I’m part Cuban, so when I talk to her, I do it, too!)
But I had a backup. If there’s one thing you need in a hurricane plan, it’s a backup: I had booked another hotel room out by the interstate.
Yeah! Bring it Matthew!
Only, in this great plan of mine, I didn’t expect to be staying in it with my mother. With my wife and daughter already with a friend in Julington Creek, and much of Thursday spent at work or hurriedly readying my house before leaving the lonely streets of downtown St. Augustine, it’s where I ended up on Thursday evening.
Mom and me.
My mother likes to ask questions: “Brian, will you take Lady for a walk?”
Me: “There’s a category 3 hurricane outside!”
Mom: “I know, but she hasn’t been outside in 13 seconds.”
Me: Grumble, grumble, grumble.
I go. I come back. She proceeds to grill me on exactly what the dog did. I give the ever-embarrassing pee and poo report. The cycle repeats all over again.
Bring it Matthew!
I would go up to the third floor and stare out the window in the ice machine room as the storm lashed the trees. One tall palm tree bowed in the wind, standing tall and resilient against everything Matthew threw at it. I took strength from that proud palm. “You and I are kindred spirits,” I thought, melodramatically. “We shall persevere!”
I climbed back up the steps a little while later to find it had snapped in half. “BROTHER!” I cried with a gasp. “You have succumbed! How shall I carry on?!?”
I went three days without seeing my wife and daughter. It was one of the toughest things I’ve had to do. Again, I’m not making light of this. I know people have had it far worse, and still do. But it was hard. One of those things I had to do. Family takes care of family, in whatever shape or form.
“Brian, I feel so sorry you’re here and not with your wife and daughter,” my mother said, more than once. (No exclamation points.)
“Yeah, me, too,” I muttered back.
It wasn’t in the plan, but that’s how it worked out!