OH WHAT A NIGHT!

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The TV wasn’t working anymore, having lost it earlier that morning, as the winds increased and brought down power lines all over the Island. The cable was gone which meant that we no longer had Internet or phone service, we were isolated.

The raging winds caused a crash as TLW (The Little Woman) and I raced outside to see the sad sight of my neighbor Timmy and Gail’s home, with their front yard tree lying across the edge of their roof! I chased TLW into the house and took off for Timmy’s house to see if they needed help. Everyone was fine so I went home.

In the darkness, TLW (The Little Woman) decided to go to bed and be comfortable in the dark and I decided to go upstairs into the middle bedroom in the front of the house and look out at what was going on. I decided I wouldn’t go to bed as the rage of the wind seemed to warn me that I better not.

The darkness seemed to invite all the eeriness of the perfect storm, the “Frankenstorm”, and it lived up to the name. As I gazed out, the wind was blowing with such force that the trees seemed to bow to me, like I was royalty viewing from a balcony! The howling was increasing, reminding me of the sound effects you hear in a movie of a storm tossed ship at sea. But soon I was hearing the sound of sirens going off, then the howling, and then the mixture of both howling and sirens, as it became difficult to discern one from the other.

Bellport dock is under the water! Photo by Michele DePalo

I felt like I was in war torn London under the blitzkrieg, as explosions and flashes of power transformers that attested to their being made a statement, courted by the flashes of lightning lent to the chilling and uncertain atmosphere. The feeling of doom was a constant reminder that I was in the midst of the perfect storm: that maybe my life and that of my wife were in danger.

I worried about my 94 year old mother who lived alone and refused to move from her house with her boy-toy staying with her, and I worried about my older sister Tess (much older) with her husband in the hospital, I worried about a few friends I had that live alone, and I worried that I had everything in place that I needed.

Having lived on the East Coast all my life, this was new to me. Oh I had lived with fear before, lived with danger, but nothing that took over my life like this did. The fear for my and The Little Woman’s life, the house and all our memories seemed to play up big in that storm tossed night.

Finally, I decided that I would go to bed after all, take my chances with a good night’s sleep if I could get it, maybe take my mind off the storm. I didn’t work as all I thought of was the old tree that stood sentry outside my front door: its roots shallow and its stature big.