When Childhood Dreams Come True

I believed the warnings. Prepare to be without power and access to roads for a week. Needing to move my son out of his apartment in White Plains before Irene hit set me even more on edge. I went shopping with a determination to be thorough, but quick. Water, food, hand wipes, cash, gasoline. We were okay with batteries and lights.

In parking lot I stopped short, overcome by déjà vu. I’d never confronted a hurricane, but I had gathered supplies like this before.

For a moment, I was seven years old and back at my childhood home, crouching with Robin over the berry bush along the low brick wall in the front yard. We were getting ready for the big storm, gathering all the food we could before becoming housebound. In that little grassy plot, we constructed a world of wild wind battering a house filled with necessities to keep us sated no matter how long we were isolated inside.

Heading into Walgreen’s, my panic was replaced by excitement. I wasn’t just looking for water, I was living out a fantasy. A once-imagined anxiety had become a reality, and I now had a mission: to scour the aisles for provisions that would ensure our comfort however long our house remained disconnected.

As Irene approached, these childhood imaginings faded. I went to bed feeling more anxious than purposeful, as the implications of my adult failings hit me. That giant oak in my yard the landscaper had told me to get a tree guy to look at? Never did, so I spent the night worried that it would fall on our sleeping heads. The backup battery to the sump pump that needed checking? Never did that either, and so water filled the basement to our ankles.

I got away pretty easy though, despite my shirking responsibility. The tree never fell, and that basement carpet really needed replacing anyway.

We had a gas stove, a grill and great weather. And, yes, I had planned and shopped so well, that we feasted for a while on the fixings in the cooler. Two of my kids had not yet left for college, so their presence added to the sense of adventure, at least for a day or so, until one went off to school and the other to my mother-in-law’s house, which had power and, more importantly, internet.

When our electricity came back on, and I hung the clothes that I finally could clean on the line, all was quiet. The generators were off, the kids were gone. Back to real life. Would I learn this time to not have a catastrophe before me to ward off procrastination? I don’t know. Like Scarlett O’Hara, I’ll think about that tomorrow.