In hurricane prone Florida things happened in their scheduled way. The first hurricane of the season, Fay, struck Florida and just happened to miss where we live down here.  She lingered a long time in the center of the state and dumped huge offerings of needed water on Lake Okeechobee which filled that lake so high the Army Engineers thought of draining off some of that needed water.  Our section of South Florida had much needed rain, but not the show off kind that came with ferocious winds knocking down trees and tearing off roofs.  I met a woman in the Hotel lobby in Georgia who reported that the master bedroom addition to her house in Orlando was blown away.  Such stories caused some thought about what we were going to find when we got home.

We had put up our hurricane shutters just in case and our apartment was just the way we had left it and that was pleasing to us.  Not so pleasing was the reports that hurricanes 2 and 3 were in the making in the waters to the south of us. These are Gustav and Hanna that our spotters and reporters tell us that Florida might be spared because one will go into the Gulf of Mexico and the other might go north along the east coast and hit the mainland further north.  We have learned not to expect much accuracy in the reportage of hurricane tracking for those winds are fickle to the extreme.

I would like to thank Fay for all that water deposited in Lake O. But, like everything else that either needed or want you never can get just the right amount. It is either too little or too much.  In our case, it was enough water to break the drought in South Florida but northern Florida got way too much.  We saw trees down in our last run to get home when we decided not to stay one more day in a hotel on the road when our beds were waiting in our shuttered apartment.

The forces of nature are awesome.  Winds and flooding rains have spoiled lives of many despite invoking charms, the intervention of the Gods and just plain hopes and putting up plywood to keep out the storms.

While we were away Fay visited.  We were prepared, were on perhaps our last motor trip and were pleased that Fay stayed to the north of us.  We are getting plenty of rain this season and it has three more months to go before we can open those shutters.  This hurricane season is heating up just like the electoral contest. It is sort of like a box of chocolates – unless the distribution is printed up in advance on the back of the cover, you never know what you are going to get (thanks Forrest Gump). We will prepare the best we can and hope the season ends with us being dry.