THE PREP IS DONE. IT’S TIME TO WAIT
No matter what happens, we’re all in this together.
Enduring the storm’s aftermath tests our grit, if it hasn’t been washed away with our sense of humor. Our misery will have plenty of company. We’re in this together.
Now, we wait.
Those who are leaving are gone by now.
The rest of us, buttoned up and battened down, mark time by the latest National Hurricane Center updates on Hurricane Irma.
Cocooned inside our coolfor-now aluminum and plywood caves, we’re stress-eating Doritos and chocolate.
Those with impact-resistant windows will have a clear view to whatever Irma sends us.
Suddenly, all the ways we made our Florida lives beautiful have turned on us: the vinecovered pergolas that could blow into the house, the shade trees planted so hopefully that threaten the roof, the coconut palms sprouting potential wind-blown missiles, the pots of palms and flflowering shrubs that could become weapons.
That beautiful blue pool might soon become a fetid stew of decomposing leaves.
We wait because there’s nothing else to do, except some last- minute shopping.
We’re Americans. We deal with impending disaster by buying a two-year supply of peanut butter or yet another flflashlight.
“There’s nowhere to run,” said Palm Beach resident Martin Kane this week outside a West Palm Beach Home Depot.
He was talking about places to secure his 65-foot boat, but it’s true for all of us.
There is nowhere to run. No matter what happens this weekend, we’re in this together, hunkered down as Irma churns up the Florida peninsula.
We’re in it together, not just for the storm’s duration, but for the grueling slog of cleaning-up afterward if the storm doesn’t spare us.
We’ve been through it before, during Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne in 2004 and Wilma in 2005.
The misery of blistering hot days and sweaty, sleepless nights without air-conditioning. Piles of trash. The mold extending its fingers through our dark, dank houses. The pleading for someone to fix our roofs. The anger at intersections without traffic lights as drivers failed to use common courtesy.
Enduring the storm’s aftermath tests our grit, if it hasn’t been washed away with our sense of humor.
Our misery will have plenty of company.
We’re in this together. Maybe the idiocy and selfish entitlement that spawned the Flori-duh and #FloridaMan memes can chill for a few weeks while we pull our lives back together.
So, let’s check on our neighbors, buoy our most fearful friends, reassure our children and treat each other with a little more kindness and concern than usual.
Whatever this weekend brings, we’re all in it together.
Maybe we should act like it.