Note: I started writing this for the six month anniversary of Hurricane Milton’s landfall, and like so many other things lately, it fell to the wayside. I may have missed April 9th, and even June 1st (the first day of hurricane season), but there is no time like 11:11am on June 25th, right?
My new favorite long way home takes me down a path where Spanish moss hangs over the two-lane road, casually relaxing off of the towering, old oak trees that look like they have stood there for centuries. This back road is the old Florida I crave, but I look at it a bit different now.
I see the flimsy wood poles holding up the electric lines, ensnarled in the tree branches wrapping around them.
I see the river just a few blocks away, capable of overflowing its banks.
I see bits and bobs of storm damage that is still not cleaned up so many months after the eye wall of Hurricane Milton lingered over my home for hours and hours on end the night of October 9th, 2024.
For someone who has spent the better part of the last 37 years living in coastal(ish) Florida, I managed to avoid a direct hit of a hurricane eye or eye wall until last October. I have watched so many other areas take devastating hits, but we were all right on the central Gulf (of Mexico1) coast. And when my luck finally ran out, it wasn’t a Hurricane Michael or Hurricane Ian kind of storm. Milton was ferocious, yes, but it weakened considerably by landfall. By the time I was under the extreme wind warning and flash flood emergency that night, Milton was juuuuuuust barely hanging on to its major hurricane designation2.
Still, that storm has buried itself deep in my psyche.
When I drive down my new favorite road, I see what could happen if the Big Baddie shows up in my neck of the woods this year. I find myself thinking about where I would hide in my new house if it happens again in a few months. I talk about plans to quickly move our outdoors stuff inside with my husband. My search history is littered with websites for generators and giant batteries. I even had criteria for a hurricane safe(ish) house when we were on the hunt earlier this year3.
I didn’t give hurricanes and their after-effects much thought before the last few years because they were ephemeral events happening away from where I was. These kinds of storms didn’t hit where I live.
Now, sometimes, it’s all I can think about.
I used to find the way the moss swayed from trees during a thunderstorm beautiful, a lovely and frequent sight in the Deep South summers. These days, it startles something in me. I feel my shoulders tense and my breath become shallow. It’s just a thunderstorm, a normal afternoon thunderstorm, I remind myself near daily this summer.
The palm trees sway around without a care in the world, but the moss and the oak trees look just as petrified as I am when the big storms come rolling in.
I am not the same person I was on June 1st, 2024. My time was finally up last season. And, if I am still this deeply affected by a low-end category three storm nearly nine months later, I dread to see what anything stronger would bring. I feel the summers get warmer, the water temperatures reaching new records. The afternoon thunderstorms are getting wilder, and the hurricanes that do form have been intensifying more rapidly and intensely in ways we haven’t seen in modern times.
What I have experienced in Florida over the last decade is just one small piece of many more recorded phenomena associated with climate change. I have my doubts this hurricane season will be anything different…
But I will still hope it will be different in the end, that those old, mossy trees will still be standing by the end of hurricane season 2025.
For new readers, below is a list of past hurricane posts. Milton may have been my first direct hit from a major hurricane, but there have been more close calls over the last decade.
Hurricane Irma (the one that ruined my 29th birthday)
The grief and powerlessness after Hurricane Helene
Hurricane Milton, during and immediately after
;-)
Category 3 or higher
Watch out for big tree branches hanging on the roof, make sure the landscaping slopes down away from the house to prevent rain water from pooling, evacuation zone C or higher, built after 2005, underground power lines if possible, etc.