Princesses of Myth

If you’ve been wondering about the long silence here, it’s because we were slammed pretty hard by Hurricane Irene.  We were without power (and thus internet access) for a week.  The few times I could get online were devoted to dealing iwth e -mail.

We were very lucky, though.  Our house remained intact–no leaks, which was especially good considering we had just had a roof repair.  Well, I guess that proved it was a job well done! [G]

Alas, we did lose about five of our beautiful trees, including one that just missed hitting the house and one that decided to take down a bunch of smaller trees with it when it fell.  There’s a Message somewhere in that, but right now I am too tired/busy with post-power-restoration cleanup to think about it.

You take a lot of modern conveniences for granted–at least I do–and a storm like this is quite the wake-up call.  Aside from having to deal with no internet (drove to places where there was internet access), no lights (used candles), no food refrigeration (used ice chests, but lost a lot of the contents of the fridge), no running water for drinking or washing, because we have a well and it uses an electric pump (used bottled water to drink and hand sanitizers for spot-washing, plus depended on the kindness of nearby family with power and/or “city” water for showers), perhaps the worst part of it was not having toilets that flushed.  And so we hauled buckets of water (we’d prepared for this by filling many plastic bins and a BIG trash can with water pre-hurricane) and took care of flushing that way.

At least the weather after the storm was not bad.  And we learned a lot about how good people are.  In the middle of the storm, one of the trees we lost not only fell and took otehrs with it, but fell across our driveway, blocking our cars in.  We saw the damage from the safety of our house and were resigned to attacking the problem after things calmed down, when what did we hear?  A chainsaw.  My husband got suited up in heavy raingear and went outside to discover a neighbor hard at work with a chainsaw, clearin away the tree.  And believe me, it was a BIG tree!

This would be a kind act under any circumstances, but add to it this:  The neighbor was not from our street.  He lived nearby, but not that near.  He could have stayed safely in his house, but instead he went out in his truck to see how other people were doing!  And he pitched in to help us, neighbors but strangers, without being asked.

There’s a really old saying, “It’s an ill wind that blows no good,” and it looks like Irene’s winds blew this bit of goodness our way.  : )

On a mythological note, did you know that the name Irene means “Peace“?

Sometimes you’ve just got to laugh.

I hope all who read this are either completely storm-unscathed or en route to storm-recovery.