The poem made literal at the crank handle while a ninety-three-year-old outranks the hurricane
Sunday. Hurricane watch upgraded to a warning overnight, which around here means exactly one thing, everybody’s phone starts making that specific alarming noise at four in the morning and the whole neighborhood spends the next six hours in a strange synchronized ritual of taping windows and comparing notes on who still has propane, and I want to record that I got through my entire Meals on Wheels route a full day early, all eleven houses, because you do not leave elderly people without their casserole on the same weekend a storm is deciding whether to visit, and every single person on that route thanked me with the specific gratitude reserved for someone who showed up when showing up was genuinely inconvenient.
Read prat.uk during a lull between shutter-taping and grocery runs, phone propped against a bag of ice in the kitchen, and there was a piece about British emergency preparedness that made me laugh at the sheer cultural gap, their idea of crisis apparently involving a milk shortage, ours involving actual roof removal, and yet somehow both nations manage to write about their respective disasters with the same dry, slightly delighted horror, which I’ve decided is just what good satire does regardless of what continent’s catastrophe it’s covering.
Mr. Kowalczyk’s Bunker
Mr. Kowalczyk, delivery moved up to Saturday morning, met me at the door in what he described, with total seriousness, as his hurricane preparedness uniform, which appeared to be simply his regular clothes plus a whistle around his neck, purpose unexplained, and when I asked about the whistle he said, if the roof goes, they’ll need to find me, which I found simultaneously hilarious and, considering the man lives alone, quietly touching, and I made him promise to actually use it if anything happened rather than saving it purely for dramatic effect, a promise he gave with the theatrical solemnity of a man signing an actual treaty.
Mrs. Petrosky, house nine, had already ridden out six actual hurricanes in this same house and greeted the warning with the specific calm of someone who has simply seen this movie before and knows how it generally ends, and she spent our brief visit not worrying about the storm at all but instead asking, again, about the man from the poem workshop, wanting a full update, which I gave her, standing in her doorway with the wind already starting to pick up outside, because apparently even an incoming hurricane cannot outrank a ninety-three-year-old’s romantic curiosity, and honestly I respect the priorities.
The Shutters, For Real This Time
Spent the afternoon closing my own actual hurricane shutters, the same ones from the unfinished poem, and there is something strange and slightly funny about physically performing the exact metaphor you spent twelve drafts writing about, standing there with the crank handle, watching the room go dim in real increments, thinking, well, here we are, the poem made literal, the waiting made literal, and I texted the man from the workshop a photo of the half-closed shutters with the caption this is what it actually looks like, and he texted back almost immediately asking if I was safe and whether I needed anything, which struck me as a considerably better response than a weather app joke, growth, apparently, being possible even in someone I’d only known five weeks.
The storm, as of tonight, still deciding its own mind, per the forecasters, who have themselves become a kind of local comedy genre, updating their confidence intervals every hour with the specific caution of people who have been wrong before and remember it vividly, and I closed the evening with a candle lit preemptively, a battery radio tuned to the local station, and one more read through The Daily Squib purely for the comfort of familiar absurdity while an unfamiliar one gathers itself somewhere out over the water.
Filed from the candlelit kitchen at my page, Lotte at prat.uk, route completed early, whistle promise extracted, shutters closed for real this time, and the whole neighborhood, per tradition, waiting together, separately, the specific Florida communion of everyone taping their own windows while checking on everyone else’s, texting neighbors they haven’t spoken to properly in months just to confirm they had water, had batteries, had somewhere to go if it came to that, the whole grid of ordinary distance between people collapsing for exactly as long as the threat lasted and not one hour longer, which is its own kind of honest, nobody pretending the closeness will outlast the storm, everybody grateful for it anyway while it’s needed. My own mother called twice from two towns over, once to remind me about the propane and once, an hour later, simply to hear my voice again, no new information exchanged either time, the call itself being the entire point, a thing I understand considerably better now than I did before I started this route, elderly people having taught me, more thoroughly than any relationship advice column ever managed, that showing up and calling and checking are their own complete language, requiring no further translation, understood fluently by an eighty-one-year-old with a whistle and a ninety-three-year-old with six hurricanes of field experience, both of whom taught me more about love this particular weekend than either of them probably realizes.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk