Whooshing, raging storm Ophelia brings out the best under one roof
LOST the plot! Yes, the Good Woman, the ex, Wonder Woman lost the plot as Hurricane Ophelia screamed her arrival in bold typeface across the smartphone screen on Saturday.
And the weekend had been going so well. Skeletons, bug eyed with muhahaha, scary booming voices and red eyes that flare to life as you walk past them, were returned to Party World, replaced with more benign Halloween beings to placate The Whirlind Princess’s fevered imagination. Arrangements were made to get some rooms painted. I even managed a few games of pool and a match.
A lot was done. Then a trip down memory lane taking The Whirlwind Princess and The Little Fella to see Bosco at The Lambert Puppet Theatre show in the fantastic Spiegeltent on Wexford quayfront on a humid Sunday morning. Even the ear bleeding squeaks of the rosy cheeked, red headed one could not detract from the fun. Then in the queue at Aldi the news was broken to the news breaker. ‘THERE IS NO SCHOOL TOMORROW BECAUSE OF THE STORM.’
I nearly keeled over into the kale. Then the WhatsApps started arriving thick and fast. A plan was to be devised about tomorrow.
‘What if tomorrow never comes,’ was my man logic approach; the Homer Simpson on my shoulder mouthing a reassuring: ‘It’ll be grand.’
Skip forward 12 hours and there are missed calls at midnight, a WhatsApp message at 2 a.m. and again at 4.20 a.m. all detailing what to do in an event of a hurricane. I woke up, looked out the window and saw hazy sun.
Now The Good Woman is usually someone whose glacial mind is something to be reckoned with, but Ophelia had her in a tizzy. As news of a Red Alert loomed, there was no getting away with it, we’d all be spending a day cooped up together in the confines of a small three bed house on a hill in New Ross. Us against the elements.
There is something about storms that throws us back into our primordial nature, makes me, anyway, glad to live in a concrete house. Memories of evenings without power growing up in rural Ireland are stirred and of how we managed to make the most of our incarceration indoors by dwelling on nature and, maybe in doing so, realising its power and our powerlessness and that that was fine too. Like many worker drones on Sunday night I prayed Ophelia would meet her poetic end somwhere over the Atlantic, but she was having none of it.
Whistling through the fireplace, whooshing in gusty torrents against the windowpane, as I write, she raged and made her presence known yesterday.
The house was as protected as it could be. The Good Woman took every precaution, even bringing some neighbour’s plants in. The curtains were closed for fear of the double glazing shattering lending a dreamy, old world quality to the house, where the children had built a den, and played, and fought and laughed all day. The electricity flickered. Fears loomed large that it would go outright, along with the broadband too.
The day flew really and the sensation was one of being on a ship with an unknown destination. The Good Woman had a dinner and plenty of provisions so there was no wanting for anything. The destination, it transpired, was a peaceful one. The Little Fella and his sister weren’t spooked either, unlike the previous weekend when I lost the plot and my skeleton Halloween effort frightened the little lives out of them!