Calm before storm

I'm very bad at American weather. I'm very bad at extreme weather in general, I suppose; it just happens that America tends to be where I experience this sort of thing. Ireland is one of those nice calm places where we don't get earthquakes, we don't get hurricanes or tornadoes (unless the hurricane is the tail end of one that made its way all the way across the Atlantic like Hurricane Charley in 1986), we are hardly ever snowed in (except last year and the year before; I blame global warming) and where I lived, on a hill, we never flooded either. Also, we have no active or dormant volcanoes. It's a nice place to live.

And now, here in Maryland, after the - traumatic, devastating - earthquake, we have a hurricane on the way. We don't live close to the coast, we don't live in a floodplain, the trees behind our house shouldn't fall down; but our power will probably go out, because all our powerlines are above ground and the power goes out at the drop of a weatherman's hat. The electricity company has already called us to tell us to prepare for outages.

My husband has gone to Target to stock up on a few things. I imagine he's currently beating off the hordes of other frantic Marylanders to get to the shelves that by now are depeleted of everything but reject crayons and incoming Halloween baskets.  No, on second thoughts, I don't believe anyone here is panicking. I'd be surprised if Target today was anything other than the cornucopia of stuff you didn't think you needed but actually you do that it always is. He will buy batteries for our flashlights/torches, and more bread for Monkey's ubiquitous sandwiches (I'm already stocked up on peanut butter, so that's him sorted) and some bananas and pita chips. I have tins of beans, but unless we're actually starving, I don't really imagine us eating cold beans straight from the can.  Even if starving, my children probably wouldn't.

You know the way, after any natural disaster, you see the people on the news picking through the remains of their houses or gazing sadly at their destroyed property, and your brain can't really encompass that possibility, so you tell yourself that these people are different people, not like you - they're foreign, or poor, or used to things like this happening... but before this thing happened that put them on the news report, really they probably were just like you, even if they were also foreign or poor or had experienced hardships before.

I'm not saying that on Sunday morning you'll find me sadly picking up shards of my laptop on national tv, gazing into the foliage at my wedding photos scattered among the greenery, fishing out a sodden shoe whose partner is somewhere in Virginia... that's highly unlikely, if not completely impossible.

But for all those people, I wonder if it starts out a bit like this, with the denial and the half-assed preparations. I wonder if I'll ever get better at extreme weather, or if it takes an actual fully formed disaster to make anyone sit up and pay attention.