I woke up to the first swirl of wind. Lee is apparently a post-tropical cyclone now, but its long arms keep spinning, and the air is a roar of sound.

The heart of the storm is still to the south. We have a long day ahead of us, and the cat is whining and cranky. So I let him out, panicked about letting him out, and then he came back in. I hope that is the most panicking I do all day and that the three of us can now settle down into relative calm.

The power is still on, and we've got a pot of hot coffee. If the power fails, we've got a roast chicken to pick, lots of salad, half a raspberry pie, a cribbage board, candles, and many books to read. If a tree falls on the house, we have insurance.

I've been through so many storms, summer and winter, without power. I've lost water for weeks (with a newborn in the house). In Harmony, no water and refrigeration were always the issues. We had to fill buckets and pots and pans in preparation for every big storm. But we could still cook on the gas stove, and we had heat from our efficient wood stove. Here, in town, we've got city water so can flush the toilet in an outage, but we can't cook or refrigerate, and in a winter storm our little wood stove doesn't have the oomph to heat the entire house.

Somehow, in Harmony, we never broke down and bought a generator. In retrospect that seems dumb. But at the time the expense was monstrous. All expenses were monstrous. We were always so short of money.

And we still don't have one. So here we are, on a Saturday morning in September, in the little northern city by the sea, battened down for a sou'easter . . . twigs and green leaves flying . . . air a thick rumble of sound . . . Atlantic out of sight but surely white-whipped and crashing . . . sky a tight-lipped gray . . . no birds or squirrels in evidence . . . nary a desperate dog walker on the street. 

It's a beautiful day, in its own way.