And then it was all quiet … sort of.
It seems more and more these days, holidays roll in like hurricanes: plenty of warning, yet never enough time to prepare. Winds lash the trees. The water rises. You scramble, you bite fingernails, and you wish you had gotten out of town when the weatherman warned you.
“Why didn’t we go to Tahiti!”
But that’s also what makes the holiday so much fun — so exciting.
Mothers who come and stay for a week. Mine, even though the refrigerator had long since exceeded its carrying capacity, thought it necessary to buy loaf after loaf of bread from the Spanish Bakery, searching out any little uninhabited region of the fridge to cram it in. We never ate the bread, so I’m still not sure why she kept buying it.
The storm isn’t just a metaphor. It did actually come on Christmas morning, as you might recall, just as my mother was driving up from Tampa. All week she had watched the weather, petrified of a strong front that was threatening to bowl her over as she made her early morning run for St. Augustine.
She braved the winds and driving rain, hydroplaning at one point on backroads and dodging tornadoes she just knew were coming for her.
“What do I do if I see a tornado?” she asked the night before while preparing herself mentally for the journey. “I pull over and jump in a ditch, right?”
“No,” I told her. “It’s very simple: You just drive the other way.”
“You’re kidding? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! I think you’re supposed to drive right into the eye where it’s calm.”
She made it. Somehow, she made it.
We had Christmas at my brother’s, which meant loading presents, food, a baby, 98 pounds worth of baby gear, and one hot-ass quiche fresh from the oven that threatened to melt right through the floor of the car.
Just as we were walking out the door, my wife stopped, looked up at the ceiling, and said something profound. Something like, “Did you leave the water running up in the attic where there aren’t any pipes?”
There was a steady drip raining down in the dining room. The beauty of a 100-year-old house is the guarantee that it will come with at least one roof leak that cannot be fixed no matter how much effort, tar, tin or time you put into it. And ironically, it leaks the worst right after you climb up onto the roof to clean out the three feet of fall leaves gunked up in the gulley. Here I was worried those leaves would cause a flood and turns out they were the only protection for my ancient Swiss cheese roof.
I arranged buckets in the attic, and we made a run for it, just as the heaviest of the rains started. Sopping wet, we waited at the gate of my brother’s house while he laid down a plank of wood across the shin-deep moat of water ringing his front yard. Fearing a wild day like this might bring gators in the swirling pool below us, we ran across the plank and to the safety of his house.
There we found my mother, who believes that our 1-year-old child should be able to do whatever she wants, including climbing trees and mixing toxic chemicals to make small explosives.
“What do you mean you don’t let her eat concrete?” she demanded. “You boys grew up eating concrete, and you turned out OK.”
So went Christmas, and the rest of the week. Still, there were many more high points than low — my baby’s first birthday, her first steps, her first trip to the Alligator Farm.
But the New Year also means the family is all gone, the presents are done, and the fridge full of food is nice and empty. It’s quiet again, and things are getting back to normal. There might be noise, but it’s familiar, comforting noise. It’s my noise! The storm has passed and I don’t have to worry about it again, not at least for another year.