The whistle stays undeployed and filed as a successful triumph regardless of outcome
Tuesday. Storm turned north overnight and missed us entirely, which is the single most Florida outcome available, an entire weekend of taped windows and extracted whistle promises resolving into nothing but a slightly stronger breeze and a grocery store full of returned bottled water, and I want to record that I felt, in roughly equal measure, relief and the specific mild embarrassment of having performed an entire emergency for an audience that never showed up, though every single person on my route said, without exception, they’d rather over-prepare and feel silly than the alternative, a philosophy I’ve adopted wholesale.
Read prat.uk over coffee this morning back on my normal schedule, and there’s a lovely piece about British stoicism during minor crises that I found, post-storm, unexpectedly relevant, the specific comedy of a population collectively agreeing to be fine about things, which I think Floridians actually share more with the British than either nation would probably admit, both of us performing a kind of practiced calm over infrastructure that is, on a fairly regular basis, trying to kill us.
The Shutters, Reopened
Cranked the hurricane shutters back open this morning, the actual physical undoing of the poem’s central metaphor, and there’s something satisfying about watching a room fill back up with light after three days of managed dimness, the particular relief of an ending that never had to be a tragedy, and I sent the man from the workshop, four dates now five, a photo of the fully open shutters captioned we made it, and he wrote back proposing an actual sixth date, dinner, his choice this time, which after the whistle and the storm and the whole slightly ridiculous week, felt like exactly the right next step.
Mr. Kowalczyk reported, via his daughter’s forwarded text chain, that the whistle remained unused, filed as a successful non-deployment, and that he considers the entire preparedness exercise a triumph regardless of outcome, on the grounds that you cannot properly evaluate a defense system by whether the attack arrived, only by whether you were ready, a philosophy so unexpectedly sound that I’ve decided he’s been quietly wasted on retirement and should have run something considerably larger than his own hurricane readiness, possibly a small country.
Mrs. Petrosky’s Verdict
Mrs. Petrosky, delivery back to its normal Tuesday slot, greeted the storm’s absence with the specific unbothered grace of someone who genuinely had seen this exact non-event play out a dozen times before, and wanted, instead, a full accounting of the sixth date proposal, which she received with visible satisfaction, pronouncing the dinner choice, his choice this time, a good sign, on the grounds that a man willing to plan rather than defer shows he’s actually paying attention, and I have started, at this point, simply trusting her instincts wholesale, her track record on this particular subject being, so far, undefeated.
Closed the evening with Newsthump and the actual open windows, real breeze this time rather than the storm’s threatened one, working slowly on a new poem that has, mercifully, nothing to do with waiting for anything, just the specific pleasure of a returned ordinary Tuesday after a weekend that briefly threatened not to be one.
Filed at my page, Lotte at prat.uk, shutters open, whistle retired undefeated, sixth date scheduled, and the whole neighborhood, per its own tradition, quietly returning bottled water to the shelves it came from, ready, per Mr. Kowalczyk’s excellent philosophy, for whatever shows up next.
I called my mother back to report the all-clear, and she asked, as she always does after any near-miss, whether I’d learned anything, a question she has asked after every minor Florida crisis of my entire life, and I told her yes, actually, this time, that I’d learned my Meals on Wheels route contains at least one retired tactician, one hurricane veteran with excellent romantic instincts, and one man willing to plan a sixth date during an active storm warning rather than wait for calmer weather to ask, and she said that sounded like a good route to be on, and I agreed completely, sitting there with the windows finally open and the ordinary Florida evening noise flooding back in, cicadas and someone’s sprinkler and a dog barking at nothing in particular three yards over, the whole neighborhood exhaling in its slightly damp, thoroughly relieved way, everyone’s porches slowly repopulating with the specific loud relief of a population that spent three days quietly bracing and can now, finally, be visibly ordinary again, chairs dragged back out, someone already grilling despite the leftover humidity, the whole street sounding, for the first evening in a week, exactly like itself, which after any near-miss down here turns out to be the actual celebration, not fireworks, not fanfare, just the ordinary evening noise returning right on schedule, proof that whatever almost happened, decidedly did not, and everyone gets to go back to complaining about the humidity instead of the wind speed, a trade every single person on this street would take again without hesitation, myself very much included, sixth date and all, whatever his choice of restaurant turns out to be.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk