You can go crazy thinking of the many ways you become the victim of crooks, nice people, politicians and the weather.  Here in South Florida we are particularly vulnerable to the weather in the form of horrendous winds and driven rain called hurricanes.  Other part of the country have their problems with flooding and tornadoes and, in some areas, there are earthquakes and drought.  Our bete noires are the hurricanes.  We have hot weather but not as hot as “dry” Arizona and other broiling South Western states.  Some places, during winter in North Western U.S. there is so much snow that it comes rolling down from the heights as avalanches.  We just get hurricanes and if lucky they have landfalls somewhere distant from where we are.

After last year’s season of hurricanes with the ungodly damage they caused the Gulf coast, we had our brush with Wilma and lost windows which we replaced with new ones that were the sash kind rather than the louvered crank-out kind.  But, somehow we felt vulnerable and watched all during the year while there was frenetic energy spent on installing hurricane “proof” shutters.  As the shutters were going up we began to get edgy about the experience we had and thought – oh, shucks, it may be too late to get those shutters now.  But, the news was that so many people had their shutters installed, the installers were looking for work just as the season was about to begin.  That got us moving.

It was supposed to take a month or more to get the work done but we were lucky and the installers came just about a week after we placed the order.  Then we went whole hog and added two more shutters for a total of six.  We didn’t cover the bathroom windows for our thinking was and is that if the window and rains breach them, the water will go down the tub and shower.  We’ll see.

The interesting thing is the feeling of vulnerability has decreased each day the very hard-working technicians completed part of the complicated process of installing our shutters.  They ARE our shutters now for they were finished today and my feeling of vulnerability as abated a lot. One nice thing was the unsolicited remark by the head installer that our building was made of very good cement and is superior to those from the 70’s on.

But then, there is the feeling of being shut in when one closes these shutters and hope, really hard, that the hurricane may blow and the wind and rain come but that it doesn’t hit us head on and we escape being victims of the storm. So, my mind began working again and I thought of how we would shut ourselves in and shut out the world and, well – you know how it is.  Now we try to figure out how we will see and cook without electricity – but our shutters will keep us in and the hurricane out.