Big Storm Dorian

The Big Guy and I were at odds during the big storm. It was another of those will it/ won't it kind of storms and while I have more hurricane experience than Brett, he has more upper body strength and our differing ideas of “hurricane prep” meant that we squabbled and bickered while he boarded up windows I insisted didn’t need boarding and I fought to drag in my heaviest, beloved plants inch by inch. The last time a hurricane came through we disagreed on whether or not to evacuate, so Brett conceding and staying in town with my family, in turn made his family feel second best. In defense of the Unions, the storm never did show up (as we expected) and while I never pulled the “See. I was right” card I’m thinking that had I gloated, it may have made a difference this go-round when I said we didn’t need to board up the entire house. Apparently, storms in the Atlantic brew storms at Black Pig Farms. 

Ari and Nate also had a hurricane fight about the exact same thing we did. (It's that parallel lives thing we have.) So Ari and I had a high old time whining about our husband's incorrect storm priorities. Nate and Brett supported each other's thoughts through either end of the telephone. 

I brought Wilhelmina in for safety and she was even more terrifying by candlelight. 

We woke up in our dark, boarded-up house without power and stared at each other. “Now what?”

Brett ground coffee beans with a mortar and pestle and pretended it wasn’t too dark in the house to read. It was nice outside, as I had foreseen, so Brett played in the garage with his tools. We visited each of our parent's houses, threw out the melting contents of our fridge, and took sweaty naps on the couches. We cooked a weird, canned supper by candlelight which is a lot more disorienting and muggy than it is romantic. We discussed the fact that more humans have existed without lights and AC than those that have and we decided we are soft people. 

While our annoyance with the other still lingered in the air the way most foul things do, we started a puzzle on the coffee table. In search of any remaining ice cubes, Brett dug to the bottom of our freezer and I heard a soft, “our wedding cake.”

"Oh no." I said, snapping right back to that sweaty October afternoon that glitters gold in my memory. We saved a big hunk for our one year anniversary - mostly because someone told us to. Neither of us were particularly interested in eating a piece of cake that's been in a freezer for a year. Brett held the tin foil clump and looked across the house to me in the living room. 

"We're going to have to eat it!" he said. 

"Well alright! Unwrap it. What does it look like?"

Brett grabbed two forks and carried the cake into the living room and we unwrapped it by candlelight in the still, muggy darkness. 

"It's a wedding day seance!" Brett exclaimed. "Ooga chaka ooga chaka!"

"How great if we could summon the day again!" I said, "It was so fun!"

"That was the best day." Brett added. "Remember how Gettsinger was obsessed with the rental toilets?"

"Remember that guy Mattie brought?"

We found our way back to each other and exactly one month early, we ate our anniversary cake chunk while sorting puzzle pieces as a lenient storm inched by outside. 

To make matters worse, Brett was just two or three days into his night class and when we had power, had to login for the next chapters of lifeless information. Here he is in the educational bunker. 

We're in Week Four of classes now and the pups dutifully sit with him from 7:00 to 10:30 each evening until he is finished. Grace sleeps by his feet and Pippa paces around, wheezes at him, checks that I'm still home and then has a short rest before making her rounds again. Brett obediently signs-in on time each day and mostly stays in his chair solving equations and distributing wind loads. Occasionally he comes charging out of the office room and leaps onto me on the sofa and then runs back, all the while squealing his maniacal heehee's. Sometimes, and only if the subject is particularly foreign and difficult, he'll come watch a whole 5 minutes of whatever show I'm watching and then shuffle slowly back to his desk, defeated and sleepy. 

I went into the nightclass thing thinking how bored I would be without Brett because I've grown reliant on his evening entertainment but actually, I'm doing great without him! What I mean to say is that I've been significantly less productive than I thought I would be and have instead been using the Brett-free time to watch all the shows and movies that I don't have the heart to make him sit through. I tend to let Brett pick the programming because he has too many opinions when I'm manning the remote. Let the record show that he is very willing to watch a rom-com with me, it's just that he points out any unrealistic elements and he laughs too hard at the romantic one liners. I also enjoy campy shows with endearing characters no matter how absurd the premise. Brett thinks "it's adorable" that I enjoy them and I don't like that. (But don't let him fool you. He gets just as involved in them as long as I pretend that he isn't.) So I'm enjoying catching up on the silly bits of tv that I'm too embarrassed to support publicly. Sometimes I can't wait for his class to start so I can go put on the next silly episode. Don't tell him I said that.