Nana's Dining Room Table

Storm clouds had been gathering all day and the air was heavy and damp. By early afternoon the skies were nearly black except for the lightning flashes on the horizon. The schoolhouse was closed and the children sent home to help their families get ready. Windows were boarded up or x'd with masking tape, drinking water was collected along with first aid supplies, blankets, canned food. Cattle and other livestock were brought in to shelter and the minister prepared the church to serve as a refuge. The storm was coming, a category 5 hurricane, and the small island was dead in it's path. The evacuation order had come the previous day but the village had evacuated only the very old and the very sick, preferring to stay and defend their homes and livelihoods as best they could. I was born in this house, my grandmother announced, and I'll not leave it come hell or high water.

Landfall was just after 5 o'clock. The wind was deafening and the rain hit like hammerblows, the whole house shuddered and trembled. The flagpole toppled with an enormous crash and the sunporch windows blew out in a mad shower of jagged, flying glass. Water poured though the broken windows and under the door and furniture
disappeared in a whirlwind of hail. The interior windows held but the water in the sunporch had reached critical levels and the pressure cracked open the door at the same time there was a tremendous crash from upstairs and an avalanche of water and debris poured down the stairs only to meet the incoming flood from the sunporch. Up on the table, right now! Nana shouted as dirty water swirled around her ankles. The massive dining room table seated ten and had been in her family for as long as anyone could remember but we scrambled up and over the sides like drenched monkeys. The huge clawfoot legs never wavered although the water eventually reached almost halfway to the table surface. Lesser furniture would've washed away but Nana's table was well rooted by it's own weight and by history and it would survive as would we all.

The vicious storm passed through during the night and the next morning dawned brilliantly clear and sunny. Having done its worst, the water had receded. An upstairs window was broken as well as all the glass on the sunporch and there was water damage everywhere, but relatively speaking, we'd gotten off lightly. Nana packed
linens and towels and food in the big Lincoln and we began to navigate our way to the church. The damage was beyond description - roofs missing, trees and power poles downed, cars picked up and flung into ditches by the winds, broken windows and houses missing steps and walls. The road was littered with pieces of furniture, sections of fences, barrels, car parts, even half of a fishing boat. There were serious injuries, mostly from wind driven debris, but miraculously, no one had died. The clean up would take years, some families would never recover entirely, some fishing boats would never set sail again, but all would try.