Wednesday: don't name your little girl Idalia

We have a high tide this morning, the Bay is up past its usual and into the grass, but calm. 

Gray skies, gray day, not threatening, but I guess those are storm bands from Hurricane Idalia?

Otherwise, we got off this Time, though the season is really just ramping up; I mean, Hurricane Michael was in October, eh? 2018, five years ago, and all our landmarks are still so gone that I can't drive at night anymore with any sense of knowing exactly where I am or where to turn.

Can't drive after dark anymore anyway; not safely, so can't and don't.

Making landfall to the east and south of us as I sit here looking out on a peaceful day. Jim Cantore is broadcasting from Cedar Key, an island community from where most of our oysters come these days - - if memories hold true from our Apalachicola years, of too much fresh water in the Bay, it'll be a while. 

Trying to be a good patient anyway, with my closely monitored promise of no raw oysters because of the publicized fibrio threat. The promise gets rained down on me every few years and forces me to leave Heaven until it blows over. The last visitation of the promise may have lasted ten years, but there are fewer and fewer decades ahead, so we'll see. 

What nonsensical trivia to float through the mind while a Category 4 hurricane is making its way into Taylor County. We were extremely well served after Hurricane Michael, but not everyone was, and there'll be more insurance companies delaying settlement, canceling policies, declining to renew, and going belly up in the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia.

Business, though. Now dead, a childhood friend and lifelong trusted lawyer once said of hurricanes, Sadness and tears about all the devastation, Thank you for the business, Lord.

It'll be that way for the construction industry as well. 

There'll be thumbs up and high-sign slogans of optimism for years to come, and smiley-faces about everything's going to be better than ever. And yet, for those with their years of life and love deeply invested in the Place, it can never be put back together. 

I think I'll quit here.

T   

"landfall" for a hurricane does not mean that the storm is just starting, it means that the center point of the eye is coming ashore - - well half into the monster itself