Hurricane Grandma!

POSTED BY SRPLUS AT 9:32 AM 0 COMMENTS


WEDNESDAY, JULY 21, 2010

Hurricane Grandma!

Nothing was as loud as the travelers' palm crashing against the front porch of the house. A close second though were the swooshing limbs of the leviathan ficus trees in the front and back yards. Massive roots hung down like mooring anchors from their limbs to keep them from tumbling over in the sand and being swept down the street. The parimutuel payoff on the bet for show was the thunderous snoring coming from the end of the long hall to my parents’ bedroom. Herm had a day off of work. Dad loved a good nap.

Rosie had cracked the windows in kitchen, opposite from the bedroom on the lee side of the house so the pressure of the storm or Herm’s snoring would not build up inside and blow the roof off. It was something we had been told by one of our South Florida ‘Cracker’ neighbors.

My grandmother slumped on the couch; her blue hair looked like it had been outside in the tropical cyclone. She did not move from the couch in the living room and did circles around her pink rosary. Every time she passed a Hail Mary bead she mumbled “I can’t believe Herman is sleeping. I can’t believe Herman is sleeping.” I can’t remember if the Our Father’s caused three repetitions but it seemed so.

It had been four years since Grandma last came and stayed with us. That visit we had still been up north, the year before we became damn Yankees. I wondered if every time Grandma visited she would be accompanied by a hurricane.

Jane was not a big fan of flying. This was the first time she dared fly south from Long Island to see how transplanted New Yorkers were getting along down in Pompano Beach.

Donna rolled in right after Grandma in Huntington Beach. I was not sure if that was coincidental or by design. Long Island had never had a visitor like Donna in my lifetime and probably since the British chased the colonials across rivers to New Jersey. There was a lot of howling when Donna knocked at our door. The eye passed right over us and she destroyed Rosie’s favorite weeping willow tree. It was left a bare mess, mostly a stalk, a few limbs and lots of weeping.

Donna messed with South Florida too. For a couple of years after we moved we still saw some of her double whammy. The end of my favorite fishing pier in Deerfield Beach still had not been repaired four years later. It jutted into the ocean, like Grandpa’s index finger cut off at the second knuckle. Now Cleo would send the rest of the deck boards and railings out to the Gulf Stream for a trip north.

Ah yes, Cleo. She was a real bitch! Blame Grandma. I think it was the first and only time I ever heard her swear. According to the Sun Sentinel and the WCKT weather reports this bad girl was supposed to pass over fifty miles offshore and she was weakening. Ha. Like when it is pouring out and the weatherman can’t see out the window he does not have. If Cleo had passed on the other side of Bahamas instead of right up Dixie Highway four blocks west of us then we would have been on the ‘weak side’ of the storm. Instead of having a walk in the park with a lot of rain from a weakening storm; we had the eye passing right over our house.

It was a well defined eye. Donna’s had been more blustery and I did not hear Annie or Willie Nelson singing as it went overhead. Cleo defied all predictions as far as we were concerned and for awhile it was clear and sunny with no wind at all. We went outside and the neighborhood was a wreck. There was enough water to float a small yacht. It looked like fall up north on our ‘high ground’ except all the leaves were shiny green. Pompano Beach, Florida has an average elevation of 3.67 feet above sea level and I think the 21 feet above sea level is at the top of the water tower.

Grandma got off the couch and came out to the once carport now front screened in porch. Some of the screens were still there but if you were looking for protection from the mosquitoes inside the house was a better bet. She held the palm of her hand to her forehead and just kept shaking her head. Herm was still asleep in the bed. Gram wanted us to come back in since somehow she knew that the beautiful weather was about to change despite the double rainbow.

Mom closed the windows on the west side of the house and cracked a couple on the east side because Donna and Sandy’s mother told her that is what she was supposed to do if the eye went over us. It was one of the few times they spoke when we lived across the street from them. Before the storm Rosie had also filled the bath tubs with water after she cleaned them with Clorox again on the advice of our Cracker neighbor. She told us we would need water to drink in case the main broke or the city water got contaminated. She told us to fill some buckets and containers for flushing the toilets, anything we could find. This is something they often forget even in modern hurricane preparedness pamphlets.

Cleo finally headed north and out of town. We were glad to see her go but anxious to examine what was left in her wake. We found some smaller limbs from others’ trees in our yard but none of ours. Mom would not let us out in the yard; she was worried we would get worms if we walked barefoot in the standing water. Dad said we would not go to school the next day since they probably didn’t have any power. He made as much food as we could eat on the barbeque grill. Everything from the fridge and freezer was in Styrofoam coolers.

Supposedly Cleo after she passed Haiti and went over Cuba weakened to a tropical storm. Also, it also barely reached hurricane strength when it hit Florida. It must have been the eye wall and some tornadoes around it that we experienced late in August 1964. When we rode our bikes up to Cypress Plaza one block west of the house the next day after cleaning up, every parking lot light was bent over to the ground; long steel I-beams blown over like straw.








After dinner that night Grandma asked dad, “Herm, how could you sleep through that storm.”

Dad replied, “I guess I was just tired.”


I used to joke with some of my friends that if mom had left the windows closed on the Cypress Plaza side of the house maybe dad’s snoring wouldn’t have blown over all of those light poles.


Grandma went home after the airport opened back up. I know she made one more trip to Florida before she died. I was away at college. Joanne learned the secret and recipe for making Irish Soda Bread.

I don’t think Grandma’s visit was during hurricane season. Cleo already had taught her that lesson.


Hurricane Donna was not the reason my family left Long Island and turned into damned Yankees. I sometimes wonder what my girlfriend of the time is doing… Nancy Wright: what a name. But there is always that other one. The one before Nancy, the one I snuck that first adolescent kiss from as we danced to that song and hurricane named for her.




© 07.21.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
POSTED BY SRPLUS AT 10:26 AM