Tonight I went for the first walk that I’ve been on in probably four months. The temperature was a wonderful 70 degrees and the air was surprisingly calm … a stark contrast to how it was two nights ago!
The last couple of days have been dominated by Hurricane Milton as it came barreling in from the Gulf and crossed Florida just south of Tampa. I believe it was a Category 3 when it made landfall down by Sarasota, which was somewhat of a relief because it had gotten up to a Cat 5 during its journey across the Gulf of Mexico over the previous days.
We were extremely lucky with this one – we didn’t lose more than a handful of shingles off the roof and our power stayed on through the entirety, compared to the 3+ million Floridians that lost power – many thousands of which are still out two days later as I write this. Some areas still have flooding and others look like they got hit by a tornado, which is a definite possibility … I think I saw a stat of something like 700 tornados spawned from this thing across Central Florida.
For our part, we stayed home and hosted some family from nearby, the kids had fun making forts to sleep on in the living room on account of giving up their beds, and overall it was just a nerve-wracking couple of days. By far the worst came at night – it’s amazing how loud 100+ mph winds can be – and although two out of three slept right through it, David struggled and I ended up staying up with him as we wrapped up season 3 of The Rings of Power and enjoyed dessert.
Surprisingly, he actually seemed to enjoy it and followed along as I tried to explain the story in eight year-old terms, so we may have to start reading The Hobbit together sooner or later!
As expected, the next day as photos of the damages began to show up online, it was pretty heartbreaking – particularly to see where Milton had piled on in areas where Hurricane Helene had already passed through barely a week prior. This one destroyed lots of signs and trees, tore the roofs off of two stadiums, and flooded a ton of streets and neighborhoods – many that don’t normally see issues like that, but I guess there’s already so much water in the ground from the last one that it just didn’t have anywhere else to go.
The homeschool co-op where our kids go took some pretty big hits, and Sara has already been over there to help wherever she can. Just in the brief running around I did this afternoon to grab a few things from the store, I saw major traffic lights that were out or damaged and shelves at the grocery store are still bare from people’s preparations a few days prior. I couldn’t help but think that as frustrating as it was to find parking at the mall so I could run into Red Robin and grab my pickup order, I’m sure a good number of those people were out because they still don’t have electricity at home and they just needed to get out and enjoy air conditioning for a few hours!
We’ve tried to balance how we talk to the kids about storms like these because although we don’t want to send them into a panic – which is easy to do with autistic kids – but we also want them to sincerely understand not only how dangerous hurricanes can be but also how lucky we are that we didn’t get hit harder ourselves. Looking at pictures of flooded houses and missing roofs is one thing, but explaining that these people just lost everything except for each other adds a context that I think is really important to learn even at their age.
Maybe it will be the difference between them being prepared and something tragic for not taking a hurricane seriously enough ten or twenty years from now … if Florida is still above water at that point, anyways…
So yes, I’m grateful that my hurricane clean-up was limited to picking up shingles around the yard and not throwing away furniture and carpet and drywall and basically everything else that the storm water touched. And I know that even after the power companies have utilities up and running, those who were hit hard by this thing have a long journey ahead of them to anything close to resembling normal. I definitely couldn’t imagine navigating all of that and having kids or a job that wasn’t understanding like mine has been.
The sheer power of mother nature certainly isn’t something that you want to fuck with, and hopefully we won’t hear a roaring wind again like that until hurricane season next year … or even later, if we’re lucky.