The Lord's Day

Our job now is to have a full tank of gasoline and watch track updates for the wobbling. Water bottles in the car, food in cans that can be opened without a can opener. Toothbrush &c. Batteries for our ears.

Our hurricane evacuation of memory took us east and south, from Apalachicola to Perry the fall of 1985. We left town with neither a credit card nor a penny, must have had a gas station charge card though, because I don't recall fuel for the car being an issue.

Arriving in Perry, we headed straight for a motel on US98 with a restaurant that I remembered stopping there a few Times on drives from Panama City to Gainesville when I was in college 1953 to 1957. It was still there and the same Southern cooking. I told our motel hosts that we had left home with no cash, and they said don't worry, just send us a check when you get back home. It was Southern Hospitality in caps. Linda, Tass and me.

Fall 1985 we had three hurricanes, for one, we went to Marianna and the next morning we woke up in our motel to find that the hurricane had wobbled in our direction, so we had to pack up quickly and head elsewhere.

For the last one, we were sick and tired of evacuating, so we turned off the lights in the rectory as the emergency vehicle with loudspeaker drove by ordering "Mandatory Evacuation" and stayed home in the rectory. Memories are better than True Facts, so Who Knows? but mine includes standing in the living room of the rectory watching through the front windows to the west as a patch of sunlight that was the hurricane's eye went through the woods between Apalachicola and Port St Joe. At the same Time, watching orange traffic "barrels" come bounding down 6th Street in front of me:

the town's old water tower had collapsed and fallen, knocking aside the traffic markers that had been there because work had been going on at that intersection.

The water tower, a major landmark to me from days in Apalachicola with my father in the 1940s, stood in the center of a driving circle at the Gorrie Square intersection, 6th Street and Avenue D, right in front of Trinity Church. The rush of water from the crushed tower washed out the white concrete coping marking the park area in front of the church and across Avenue D in the part of Gorrie Square at Dr Gorrie's tomb. The coping may still be out of kilter, maybe I'll remember to check the next Time we're in town.

Memories traveling to one of the deep, deeper, deepest places of my heart, not a good idea this dark, very early Sunday morning, T, so move on.

Here's the current map from the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Will be updated about every three hours until the storm clears through.

Already showing the "wobble"

Sunday morning still dark way early.

First mug of hot coffee with half & half and two tablespoons of Steen's 100% pure cane syrup.

RSF&PTL