70 Staples – Not broken. Rebuilt.

“Hurricane Irma could potentially hit Florida as a Category 5 hurricane.”

That was the sentence.

No comfort. No soft landing. No, “these tracks change all the time.” Just a flat, efficient announcement that suggested I might shortly be blown into Georgia.

At the time, I was living alone in west central Florida. I was fifty-something, divorced, accompanied by one shelter dog named Coco, and renting a house with three large sliding glass doors facing south like they had a personal death wish.

The official advice was simple: evacuate.

Now, on paper, that sounds very reasonable. In real life, evacuating Florida when everyone else is also evacuating Florida is like trying to leave Walmart on Black Friday after somebody yells, “Free generators.”

The governor kept urging us to leave. Fine. Great. Lovely idea. But exactly how does one evacuate an entire peninsula when the storm is big enough to menace both coasts? The gas stations were dry, the interstates were parking lots, and the grocery stores looked like they had been looted by nervous Baptists.

Like every other Floridian with access to the Weather Channel and a false sense of meteorological expertise, I began obsessing over the forecast models.

The spaghetti models shifted east.

Whew.

Maybe I could unclench a little.

But the Euro model, that smug overachiever of weather forecasting, was not buying it. The Euro thought Irma might come farther west, which was deeply rude and not at all the answer I was looking for.

So there I was, trying to decide which colored squiggle I wanted to trust with my life. Meanwhile, I had three giant glass doors, a yard full of tall trees, and just enough common sense to know that none of those things belonged in the “good news” category.

I kept going to work, because that is what women do. We continue answering emails while quietly considering whether we are about to die in patio-door-related circumstances.

I grew up in Florida, so storms were not new to me. I had been through tropical storms and those little nuisance hurricanes that mostly just throw yard furniture into the next county. I was in Washington State during the year Florida got walloped by three hurricanes in one season, so I missed that extravaganza. Washington has windstorms too, of course, but in Washington you get pelted with tumbleweeds, not palm trees and somebody’s lanai.

As the days dragged on, the models shifted farther inland.

That was the moment I realized I had waited too long.

By then, the highways were jammed, the gas was gone, and hotel rooms had vanished into folklore. My landlord and I were scrambling to find plywood, but apparently the entire state had already beaten us to it. Home Depot might as well have posted a sign that said, “You should’ve thought of this sooner, ma’am.”

So that settled it.

I was going to shelter in place. In a house full of exposed glass. With a dog. And a rapidly worsening personality.

I put the icemaker into full production like it was working a second job. I gathered what passed for provisions at Winn-Dixie, which at that point looked like the aftermath of a prison riot. I bought the only canned goods left, because when civilization begins to teeter, one’s standards fall hard. This is how I ended up with canned Brunswick stew and Spam, two items I would not normally eat voluntarily unless threatened with a legal summons.

Then I waited.

As Irma tore through the Keys, it became painfully obvious she was tracking farther west than many people had hoped. Friends and coworkers in Sarasota, who had been feeling pretty pleased with themselves just a day or two earlier, were suddenly trying to get out of town before their optimism killed them.

The winds started picking up around my place, so I made up a bed in the safest room in the house: my bathroom.

Now let us pause here.

Nobody wants to ride out a major hurricane in what is essentially the poop closet. This is not what any woman pictures when she imagines her finest hour. But there I was, arranging blankets on the bathroom floor like I was auditioning for Little House on the Prairie: Indoor Plumbing Edition.

I even nailed a thick comforter over the sliding glass door in my bedroom in case it shattered and I needed protection from flying glass. Was this a sound structural strategy? No. Was I at the point where a comforter felt like tactical equipment? Yes.

Sunday morning, my phone started screaming tornado warnings for my area.

That did not help my mood.

I spent about an hour and a half in the bathroom while small branches came down around the house and my nerves did their own private tap dance. Outside, the wind kept rising. On TV, the storm track kept getting uglier. Every forecast seemed to show Irma flirting with the west coast of Florida like a deranged ex.

Then, to my horror, she turned due north.

Straight toward me.

That 2:00 a.m. Monday marker on the forecast map?

That was me.

Me and Coco, both scared witless and in absolutely no position to fight back.

At 11:00 p.m. Sunday night, the wind hit the house so hard it shook. Not rattled. Shook. My sister-in-law called from Spokane because she was worried about me, and I stayed on the phone with her while the world outside began to sound like God was emptying a junk drawer onto my roof.

Coco and I headed back into the bathroom.

Then something big hit the house.

Big.

Not “oh, probably a branch” big.

Big enough that I was instantly convinced a tree had come down and the roof was next. I was sitting on the bathroom floor, feeling the pressure drop, hearing the house groan, and thinking, “Well, this is a stupid way to go.”

It is a deeply unsettling thing to ride out a direct hit from a hurricane alone. Yes, I had Coco, but there is only so tightly you can hug a frightened dog before the dog begins to suspect the ship is going down.

So I grabbed my knees, lowered my head, and prayed out loud.

Not one of those elegant, composed prayers either.

I’m talking about the kind of prayer that starts as a plea and ends as hostage negotiation.

Then, after what felt like twelve years, the eye passed over.

Everything stopped.

No wind.
No rain.
No noise.

Just a weird, flat calm that felt unnatural enough to qualify as haunted.

In an act of poor judgment that I fully own, I stepped outside to see what had hit the house. A couple of neighbors had wandered out too, because apparently none of us were bringing our best decision-making skills to the occasion. I could not see much in the dark, but I did see a transformer blow to the south of me.

And then something happened that remains one of the strangest moments of my life.

The frogs started.

All at once.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of them, croaking in some kind of amphibian victory chorus like they had personally driven the hurricane off and were now celebrating with a full-throated swamp hallelujah.

The sound was unreal.

Then, just as suddenly, they stopped.

And right on cue, the wind came roaring back from the opposite direction.

I went back inside, back to the bathroom, back to my glamorous storm bunker, and spent the next three hours being battered from the other side. Somewhere around 4:00 a.m., exhausted beyond reason, I finally fell asleep on the bathroom floor.

When I woke up, I discovered I had never lost power the whole time, which frankly felt show-offy.

Outside, the damage was everywhere.

Large limbs were down all over the yard. The tree between my neighbor’s house and mine had splintered and fallen, somehow missing both homes. That must have been the giant thud I heard during the night. No damage to the house. No broken windows. Nothing but limbs, debris, and a neighborhood that looked like it had gone a few rounds with a war machine.

Lakeland looked just as bad, maybe worse. Power, water, and sewer were out for millions. And the people who had managed to evacuate were now trying to come back into a battered state with no gas, endless traffic, and no idea what they were heading home to.

And that was from “just” a Category 2 by the time it reached us.

I hate that word. Just.

There was nothing “just” about any of it.

As scared as I was, I could not stop thinking about the people in the Keys and southwest Florida who endured far worse. I was lucky beyond reason. My house held. My windows held. My dog held it together better than I did. Others lost everything.

But the part that stayed with me most was not the wind, or the waiting, or even the frogs.

It was this.

Before that storm, I used to think I was perfectly fine being alone.

And maybe I was. Maybe I am.

I can absolutely handle things myself when I have to. I can buy the supplies, improvise bad safety measures, hunker down in the poop closet, and pray like my life depends on it. Because sometimes it does.

But that storm taught me that being capable of being alone is not the same thing as wanting to be alone.

Turns out, having someone to hold onto in a crisis is not weakness. It is not neediness. It is just human. And after spending the better part of a night on my bathroom floor with a terrified dog and a roof that sounded negotiable, I had to admit that having someone in my life to have and to hold might not be such a bad idea after all.

Also, a few lessons.

Do not wait until hurricane season to buy supplies.

Keep your gas tank topped off.

If the Euro model starts looking smug, you should get nervous.

Evacuate early or resign yourself to dining on whatever canned horrors are left at Winn-Dixie.

And for the love of all things holy, stock emergency food you actually like. Because surviving the storm only to celebrate with Brunswick stew and Spam is not triumph. That is a second, deeply personal disaster.

Love your neighbors. Be kind. Somebody will always have it worse than you.

And if Grammarly still thinks I overused the word “terrifying,” Grammarly can kiss my storm-battered ass.