Ohio hurricane

When I told the girls that it was going to be a little more windy and maybe rain a lot on Sunday due to the hurricane that had come ashore in Texas, I had no idea what was in store. In fact, until the power started flickering and I looked out to see the glider swing in the backyard upended, I wasn't even aware that the winds had arrived.

Around 4:00 yesterday afternoon, the power flashed sending the girls racing up the stairs from the basement screaming at the top of their lungs. "The lights just went off and on, Mom!" They had done the same in the living room, knocking off the tv I had just switched on to see if there was some kind of storm warning alert. It took a few minutes to get the set back on, and the weather channel listed nothing - no storm warnings, no wind advisories. Not satisfied with that, I was just tuning in to a local station when the power went out for good.

The girls were happy to be the bearers of the flashlight as they went into the basement and brought up puzzles for Malaika to work on. Adia and I sat on the couch and worked our way through her I Spy book. I made some calls and found out that our friends in the area had power, but it went out while I was talking with her on the phone. Friends on the west side had returned home from an outing to the zoo to find the large tree in their back yard split and half of it fallen. During the course of the storm, the other half fell and took the power line down with it. Our minister had made it to the church where the power was still on, but since my car was in the garage and I wasn't up to fighting to get the door up manually, we decided to stay home.

We are blessed with a wall of windows in the living area of our home, so we didn't really feel the lack of lights. The house was eerily quiet, broken by only the beeping of the battery back-up for my electronics - a wise addition as, in this situation, it undoubtedly saved the thousands of images on my external hard drives. It was warm and humid outside and without the air conditioning running the house warmed up a little more than it would have otherwise been. But we were comfortable.

As the twilight descended, I cracked open the refrigerator and made a round of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner. The girls topped their meal off with applesauce. The wind died down a bit and I went out and fastened the cover on the grill most securely and tucked the chairs tighter around the table on the deck. The girls didn't argue about getting into their pajamas before it got too dark upstairs. And they found little flashlights on their belt-clip radios.

By 7:30 they were ready for bed. I don't know if it was the excitement or the novelty or nerves, but they both went right off to sleep as though it was much later in the evening. I spent a little time by candlelight talking with my mom and reading some of my coursework for church. But it was early when I blew out the candles and went to bed, too.

The power returned sometime in the middle of the night. I heard a beeping that I thought was the battery backup coming back on. When I got up to investigate it, I found that it was the alarm system panel in the bedroom, so I silenced that and went back to sleep. The cell phone rang twice early in the morning - once when my friend called to reschedule our meeting for this morning because her kids were home from school as well and once when Kindercare called to say they would be closed due to the power outage as well. I heard Malaika stirring about the time of the second call, so I scooted down to her room to tuck her back into bed, tell her there was no school today, and warn her off going in and waking her still snoring sister. The kids slept until after 9:00 a.m.

We were lucky. None of the trees in our backyard were broken or uprooted. Just down the street, several trees lay on their sides with the roots on the wrong side of the ground. Chain saws buzzed all afternoon. We went out and filled a plastic garbage can with sticks and branches and pulled a pile of larger branches around the side of the house on a tarp to await next week's yard waste pick up. The clean up took us about an hour. The only casualty was the glider swing - the frame was wrenched apart and the swing seat unhinged.

Adia and I ventured out to the store in the afternoon while a friend stayed with Malaika at the house. The store was open and operating under emergency lighting. There was no refrigeration at all. The freezer blocks sat cordoned off with yellow caution tape. We picked up two loaves of bread, some applesauce, and toilet paper and Adia was able to complete her Girl Scout homework assignment.

After dinner, the girls played in the backyard with the neighbor kids until bath time. After reading to them, they both went right to sleep. I waited up for the news. A category one hurricane (minus the rain) had passed through on Sunday. Winds ranged 75-80 mph. That explains the one branch I pulled out of the ground this morning. It was sticking up, but when I grabbed it, it wasn't loose. In fact, I had to give it a good yank as it was buried in the ground a good few inches.

There will be no school again tomorrow. The news reported that some places are looking to get power back by Sunday afternoon. (It's Monday night as I write this.) There is an ice shortage and residents are encouraged to conserve water. News cameras showed large trees down all around the area, with numerous of them falling into homes. At least one man was struck and killed by a tree outside his home. My friends on the west side were still without power when I talked to them this afternoon on the phone.

We are fortunate. I prepared last night's dinner for the girls tonight. They both got baths. For good measure, I backed up the images on my external hard drive. As I head off to bed now, I will say a prayer of safety for those who remain without power, without food and water. Tomorrow will be another quiet day as the city recovers from the hurricane.

Through a different lens

I don't know if it was this complicated in previous school years. Maybe it is simply the added complexity of third grade. Or maybe it is that in my juggling I now have more balls in the air than I did in the lazy days of summer. Whatever, the transition into the school year has been much more challenging than I remember.

Memory is a funny thing, like a soft focus filter on a portrait lens. It takes the harsh edges off, given enough time. Worry, on the other hand, stops action like a super fast sports lens leaving hands, feet and contorted mouths in crisp, mid-motion detail. I think maybe it is time for me to change my lens.

My daughter struggles with reading. I am not exactly sure what the struggle is and so far, I'm not having a lot of success getting anyone to explain it to me. One day she reads through with little difficulty and the next day, she has trouble brining out the little words, prepositions and subject pronouns in particular. She gets frustrated. She yells at me, "You're not helping me." I feel terrible. I am not a trained teacher. I don't know how to help her. Sometimes she can sound the words out, which is the only way I know to help her decipher them, and sometimes she gets all the syllables correct but cannot string them together into a recognizable word.

She labors over writing assignments. I have yet to identify if that is because she labors over the act of writing itself (her handwriting borders on the illegible) or if it is because she labors inside her mind over the construction of what she needs to say. "I can't think of anything." "I don't know what to write." I try to help her think about what she wants to say, work it out orally and then move toward the writing of it. But she often is not able to tell me even what she is thinking.

I can tell by her mutterings that she feels unsuccessful: "I can't do it." "See what the problem is with me?" "I'll never get it right."

I have spent the past six years of her life working to find her the help she needs, trying to figure out what makes her tick, and searching out strategies for helping her bring out the success that I know is inside her. She is smart. She is curious. She asks me pointed questions about the working of the world that sometimes require a trip to the internet for the answers. She remembers details of conversations that we have had that I do not and will remind me in a way that seems to say, "Mom, we talked about that, why don't you remember?" Yet, I do not feel any closer today to an answer to the question of how to help her, how to get her educational experiences to match her learning mechanisms and needs, than I was when she started preschool. Navigating the supplemental support system at the school is cumbersome at best and most often painstakingly slow. I am afraid that by the time an answer is found it will be too late to help her.

In the meantime, I am left with the image of her getting out of the car this morning. She was happy and excited because they were allowed to bring a stuffed animal to school. The class filled their marble jar and voted for reading with their animals as reward. She unbuckled her seat belt and slung her backpack onto the seat to wriggle into to it, but for just a moment she stopped. She held against her chest her Siberian Husky, Hugdog, wearing a pink velveteen skirt and matching hoodie jacket with a red rose embriodered on it and gray Joe-Cool sunglasses between her blue eyes and her furry, pointed ears. Time stood still, as she placed a slow, gentle kiss atop her dog's furry head. Then she got into her back pack and, with Hugdog tucked safely in her arm, walked toward the back door of the school building.