Screaming Like A Hurricane

Written 9/2/2010


"Have you ever experienced a hurricane or other national disaster before?"


I assume this spawns from Earl.


My first hurricane was Hurricane Fran. I don't remember it, as I was still a baby. Afterwards, with tree debris everywhere, my parents and neighbors from up and down the street would fling their windows open and go out to the sidewalk to chat in the evenings and help each other clean up all of the branches and stuff. They would put me to bed, and I would scream, because I knew screaming would make Mommy or Daddy come back and hold me.
But that night, one of the neighbors stopped them. "Let her scream," she said. "It's good for her. She'll stop in a few minutes." And after that, bedtime was bedtime.
It might be because of that that I've always had an issue with waking them up when I'm sick. I'll often just...suffer, because I know they can't help, and then in the morning when they find out Mom's always "upset." I say "Well, if I had woken you up, what would you have done?" She says "I don't know. Held your hair back for you while you threw up. Been a Mom." And while having Mom take care of me when I'm sick is always nice, I can't bring myself to wake them up in the wee hours of the morning. Especially since neither of them gets enough sleep anyways.
Example: In 3rd grade, I had a particularly bad case of poison ivy. The doctor had prescribed Benadryl, and the dosage for my age was "1-2 tablets." One night, I took two instead of one. That night, I started hallucinating (which was a fascinating experience that I will possibly post about soon, but that would be a tangent, so I won't do that here). Instead of going into their room (and the TV was on, so they were definitely awake), I sat in the hallway, scared.
Thankfully, I haven't been more sick than a cold in...two years(?) other than my two surgeries, which don't count because I wasn't actually ill.
So that hurricane impacted my life. Mostly for the better, because I wasn't as spoiled after that. That can be an issue with oldest children (not nearly always, though).


I was nearly 5 during my second hurricane, which was Floyd. All I remember is watching the wind irritate the leaves on the trees in our backyard. There were a lot more trees back then (we got a bunch of them cut down later). I guess we must have gone to bed, because the next thing I remember was Mom and Dad carrying me and my oldest younger sister downstairs. Sarah was already down there.
We watched Pooh's Grand Adventure (which is an excellent movie, I might add, although I'm not sure if I've seen it more than once since then) and Mom and Dad stood in the kitchen and...listened to the radio? Called relatives? I'm not sure.


There have also been some freaking awesome thunderstorms I've seen at the beach. But they weren't "natural disasters." They were just...unbelievably amazing.