As I write this on Tuesday morning with pea-soup air that’s as still as can be, it’s hard to believe that a major hurricane is looming in the Gulf.  You may have seen the funny quote going around this week that watching a hurricane is like watching a turtle race. Models flip-flopping, tracks changing, wind speeds up, down, and all around. By the time you are reading this, we’ll be in it one way or the other.

As we prepared for Ian this week, I was thinking back to storms past and one story in particular made me chuckle. Some of you may have been here in 2004 when we had what felt like storm after storm: Charlie, Frances, and Jean. In Charlie, we dodged a big one as it took a little jog just before making landfall. But in Frances and Jean, although they were only tropical storms and came from the Atlantic across the state, they did plenty of damage in our area with widespread power outages and trees down.

When Frances came through, Kim and I were putting the finishing touches on our preparations at home when our power went out. It went out really early in the day, way before the storm arrived. Since living without power isn’t fun, we headed over to Kim’s parent’s house with the idea of weathering the storm in comfort. Vicki had just put a breakfast casserole in the oven, so we’d have a hot breakfast, tasty coffee and get ready to storm-watch. And then their power went out. So much for breakfast. Fortunately, the oven was just hot enough to safely cook off the egg casserole, so we did have a delicious, filling meal that day.

I will say it was interesting being without power at that time. We played cards, cooked on the old Coleman stove, and tried to eat as much as we could from the fridge before it went bad. It took about a week for the power to come back on at both of our houses. Let’s hope we fare better today.

From all of us at Kerby’s, we hope you are safe and secure. We’ll be hunkering down today and tomorrow, with plans to reopen the nursery Saturday if it is safe to do so. We’ll have lots of putting-back-together to do, but we do plan to hold the Butterfly Seminar at 10am Saturday morning as scheduled. We’ll let you know if anything changes. In the meantime, check out our Teaching Thursday article for a little butterfly garden information.

Oh, and we did manage to get our pumpkins in before the storm, however, we’ll need additional time to get the pumpkin wall set up. Look for it to open later next week. We’ll post in this newsletter and on social media when it is ready.

Stay safe and don’t eat all of your hurricane snacks at once. Pace yourself, we’ll all get through this.