Company’s coming. Or so the meteorologists keep telling us. Hurricane Dorian is puttering about out in the Atlantic, trying to decide when and where to visit us. Forecasters have Dorian making landfall at Miami, Florida or Charleston, South Carolina. Or Halifax, Nova Scotia. They’re a bit fuzzy about the actual destination. True Floridians regard Category 1 and 2 hurricanes as petty annoyances but Category 3 and above call for action. They’re calling this one a Category 5. I think that’s as high as they go.
With the impending hurricane, I’m fortunate none of my current Beardie crew suffer from sound sensitivity. They don’t particularly like t-storms but they don’t go freak-city when one strikes though they may stick a little closer to me for the duration. I can’t help but recall Kendra from a few years back who once cleared a six-ft. fence at the first crack of thunder to race for the safety of the house. Another time, I had opened the fridge door while a storm was raging outside. Kendra shoved a salad out of the way and curled up on the bottom shelf of the fridge.
Two years ago, Hurricane Irma tromped through our neighborhood, downing about a dozen large trees around my place. (Free firewood, anyone?) But what I remember most about Irma was the green lightning. That’s right — green. Later, I looked it up and found it’s a rare sight, since most green lightning occurs inside clouds where it’s not visible. Possibly it’s seldom seen because most sensible people have their windows boarded up during a hurricane. So I watched in fascination. Eventually, some semblance of sanity took over so my sleeping bag. Beardies and I moved to the hall (no windows) to get some sleep.
One rather memorable hurricane happened over a decade ago when fellow Beardie owner Chantal Andrew graciously invited my 90-year-old mother, my Beardies, and me to ride out the impending storm at her home. Of course the power went off, leaving little to do in the daylight hours but read or watch the whitecaps on the swimming pool. Chantal was an emergency room nurse on the night shift at the time, so she had to take off for work regardless of weather conditions. The fun started a couple of days later when the power unexpectedly came back on in the wee hours of the morning. The returning power prompted the smoke alarm to start screeching. I had no idea how to turn off the shrill shrieking and Chantal was at work. The alarm was positioned fairly high on a hallway wall so I dragged a chair beneath it to try to reach it.
My mother had taken over the guest room, which was entered through the aforementioned hallway through a (closed) door. The piercing wail woke my mother even though she was partially deaf. Standing on the other side of the closed door, she shouted, “What’s going on?” Balanced precariously on the chair and stretching to reach the alarm, I yelled “Don’t open the door!”
“What?” my mom responded as she opened the door. We managed to scrub the bloody streaks off the wall that were left by my fingers as I slid downward when the door clobbered the chair.
Chantal’s home is blessed with indoor/outdoor runs, which delighted my boy Crispin. He took some sort of perverted pleasure in popping outside to stretch out in the pounding rain and whipping winds. Obviously he wasn’t bothered in the least by the reverberating thunder or howling winds. He appeared to be the complete opposite of ‘sound sensitive.’ The storm moved on, and we moved back home. Mom decided to do a little cleaning, brought out the vacuum, and flicked the switch. At the first sound of the vacuum, Crispin leaped up in panic and raced down the hall to take refuge in my bedroom. Well, we all have our hang-ups.
— alice bixler, Summerfield, Florida, Bearded Collie Club of America, BCCA.us.
