Storms

I've been thinking back to the fall of 2004. It was a busy year for me, since I'd just graduated high school. When Charley hit, I was preparing my things to move into my dorm in college. I'd spent the week prior with a friend and was forced to come home because her family lived in Tampa, where the storm was supposed to hit. My family lives further inland and didn't want me being so close to the coast, so my dad made the drive to come get me. We came home, prepared the house and our animals, and packed up our things to go down to our church down the street, which would be much more stable during such a storm. Sometime during all of this, Charley made the turn.
We actually managed to have some fun during the course of the storm. We played cards and listened to the radio, and hung out with the pastor and his wife. We went to bed when the power went out, but I never could sleep during a storm. I laid awake and listened to the wind howling outside and the glass doors rattling in their frames.
It was a lot worse than they said it would be. My family never takes the storms lightly, but we always take the forecasters with a grain of salt, too, because of incidents just like this one. We were prepared for the glancing blow we were supposed to get, not the full-on impact we got as it moved across the state. What we got can't compare to the impact in Port Charlotte, but because of the flat lay of the land surrounding my home area so many homes there were obliterated. It was so strange, seeing dozens and dozens of grandfather oaks, some of them over a hundred years old, uprooted and twisted and mangled. My family was spared, for the most part--our home suffered only minor damage, although we wouldn't be quite as lucky in the storms to come--but so many families still haven't recovered from the damage they suffered, from Port Charlotte to Orlando to Stuart to the Lake Buffum area, where the paths of the storms crossed (not but maybe two dozen miles from my family home).
We'd have Frances and finally Jeanne in the weeks to come, not counting the close calls we had with a number of tropical storms. Of them all Jeanne was the worst for us, as it caused a fair amount of damage to our storm-weary home. My college lost somewhere between two and three weeks of class time, which we had to make up in weekend classes. We spent two and a half weeks without electricity over the course of a little over six weeks (44 days, I believe) and got somewhere in the ballpark of thirty inches of rain locally.
And while Charley was bad, especially for the folks in Charlotte County, the total damage from all the storms together was unbelievable. Some people suffered damage initially from Charley, and by the time Jeanne had finished doing her thing what had been minor problems into major problems. It was hard to tell by the end of it all where the damage from one storm ended and the damage from the next began.
Anyway, that's the end of my walk down memory lane. I don't want to forget it, because it was a learning experience for me and I never want to forget the suffering so many people went through, but at the same time, I don't want to dwell on all of it either. I hadn't even planned on saying anything about it all, but in light of our two newly formed tropical storms (Hello, Ana and Bill!) I figured I'd take a moment and respect those who lost everything in that awful fall.