Hurricanes From Hell

I have to say that this past Labor Day Weekend was not a pleasant one. Hurricane Dorian, tied for the most powerful hurricane in history, was headed directly toward Stuart, Florida, where my sister and I own a condo that we inherited from our parents. With winds at an estimated 200 miles per hour, it decimated the northern Bahamas, and would have done the same to Stuart, but thank God turned north at the last minute. It brought back memories of Hurricane Andrew, which destroyed a significant part of south Miami with it's 185 mile per hour winds. My brother-in-law George's brother Willie and his family resided there, and after the hurricane, lived in a trailer in their driveway for God knows how long until their house was rebuilt.  In the photo on the left are my sister Susan, Willie, his wife Nancy, and their children a few years after that horror. They persevered and finally got back to normal. After Willie passed away from cancer a few years later, Nancy decided she did not want to die in Miami (makes perfect sense to me) and moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where that damn Hurricane Dorian is headed to next.

Stuart is no stranger to hurricanes, by the way.  Back in 2004 Hurricane Frances made a direct hit, and just three weeks later Hurricane Jeanne, a Category 3 storm, scored another direct hit.  My mother Mary and her friends spent a horrible night together in the condo complex's club house when Francis hit, and then all decided to stay home even it it meant dying when the next, more powerful storm came along. My mother Mary, hard of hearing, simply went to bed and did not hear a thing as the storm raged.  A few months later, after a series of falls, she came to live with me in Denver.  The next year, a third hurricane (Wilma) hit the area, and Elaine, my mother's next door neighbor, seen on the left in the right hand photo (my mother is on the right) said she spent the entire night in the bathtub, and was sure she was about to die. This photo, by the way, was taken at a restaurant called the Prawnbroker, where we took Elaine out to dinner one Friday night on one of our trips back to Stuart.  Poor Elaine passed away not too long after this photo was taken, but while she lived in Stuart, she was happy, and putting up with those damn hurricanes was all worth it to her. A life lesson for us all.