If you live on this coast you probably already know that May is hurricane preparation month. The National Hurricane Center site states that the Atlantic Hurricane Season runs from June 1 to November 30. Hurricanes that appear outside those dates are heavily fined.
This season will be different because Carol is here. In the past I had no way to evacuate myself and no intention of doing so no matter what storm was approaching. There is a number to call for those without transportation, but spending days living in a high school gymnasium with several hundred of my closest friends has slight appeal. Assuming I survived the storm’s passing, I was provisioned and prepared to be self-sustaining for at least two months. Now evacuation is possible. If an evacuation order is issued, I would want Carol to evacuate, but it is unlikely I would go with her. As some of you know I have been in hurricane force winds at sea at least eight times. I have never been in such winds on land. GANNET has, surviving on the hard Irma that hit the Florida Keys in 2017. Our condo is on the landward side of the island and less exposed than waterfront property facing the ocean. The problem is rapid intensification, such as that of the storm which struck Acapulco last year, strengthening from a tropical storm to a Category 5 in a few hours.
I am not at this instant fully provisioned, but I soon will be. Oatmeal, trail mix, powered milk all last and are eaten after the season ends and I still have two months of freeze dry meals.
I expect that what I will do will be decided at the time.
I remain on hold. Tomorrow I have a preliminary appointment with the surgeon. Not wanting to risk making the hernia worse I have not been working out and I am restless. I will be very glad to be repaired.
What I have been doing is reading even more than usual.
Each month I visit the Second French Empire through a novel of Emile Zola. This month’s was the seventh in his Rougon—Macquart series, L’ASSOMMOIR, sometimes translated as THE DRAM SHOP, a vivid depiction of the decline through alcohol to destitution, madness and death. It was the novel that made Zola famous and is enough to cause one to stop drinking, which I did. For two days. As you may recall this was not a hardship because for several months Carol and I have refrained from drinking on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. By Thursday I had recovered sufficiently from reading the novel to have a martini. Or two.
Also each month I visit Nineteenth Century Brazil through the short stories of Machado de Assis. I have a kindle edition of his complete short stories. He published seven volumes of them and I read one volume a month. Three more to go.
At present each morning I visit China of the Tang period, 618-907 A.D., though its poems, the trenches of the Western Front of the First World War though the devastating poems of Wilfred Owen, and the Connemara, Ireland of Tim Robinson. And I am also at present with Theodore Roosevelt in the South Dakota badlands recovering from the almost simultaneous deaths of his mother and his young wife.
Today is a lovely day in the marsh, after a front passed through yesterday. Sunny, 76F/24C, with a moderate breeze. Carol and I will have drinks on the deck. I will raise my glass to words.
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