Back in June my Long Suffering Wife was just getting home from a rare night out with her girlfriends. Very close friends of mine were celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary and it was raining epically. Wind and rain, pelted our seventy-three year old house. Which having been a not quite fixer upper, and having an owner who is in no way handy had survived a lot of storms, has held up really well.
I grew up on Nantucket Island, and even lived on a boat one summer. It was not glamourous but an essay in being working poor and a lack of affordable housing before that term was election fuel. It was, as my older brother eloquently described it, “the Nantucket equivalent of living in your car”. Consequently I grew up mindful of the weather. Especially things like squalls, Nor’easters and hurricanes. I had been through a blizzard or two and my time in Iraq had introduced me to Sandstorms. If you’ve seen the world turn pink at midday, you know.
I had never lived through a tornado. I had seen twister when it came out. I had seen the after effects of a massive one that had crushed Fayetteville, North Carolina a couple of months before I visited one year but that was it. Until, one night in June, just after LSW returned home. The sound of the wind rose to an incredible pitch and ferocity. We heard the unmistakable sound of limbs cracking and well into it our phones started in with the Tornado Warnings!
We sheltered in the cellar, unaware that the Tornado had passed through. It ripping limbs off trees, knocking them down and in one case toppling one on a house up the street. Fortunately, in the cellar, waiting for the all clear, I had the presence of mind to bring a glass of whiskey down with me for morale. Which was good because the power went out fairly quickly and I was worried about the cellar taking on water, yet again.
Later, after the “all clear” the storm seemed to have calmed down quite a bit. I went outside to make sure the house was okay. I took a flashlight and heeding my late father’s advice to “treat life as though you are at a cocktail party”, I took my glass of whiskey. Clearly there are some things in life that are best not faced sober. Storm damage being one of them.
Outside the wind was fierce and I was pelted with rain. It was funny how anti-climatic a bad storm was after a baby tornado had transited through. My yard was covered with a blanket of green leaves ripped from the trees. Two tree on the property line, the maple and the hemlock, had lost large limbs. They had done minor damage to the our house, a broken window in the Florida room, and twisted gutter. We got off lightly, nothing to raise the deductible over.
Today, two and a half months later the tree guys, cut down the hemlock and the maple. I hated to do it. They gave the gifts of shade and privacy. They might have survived the next big storm, but likely not. I didn’t want to worry and I didn’t want my widowed neighbor to worry. Not to mention LSW to worry, two deployments to Iraq and almost ten years of me being a cop on midnight shift, she’s had enough of that. So they went.
The tree guys were great. They showed up when they said they would. They did what they said they would and they did it efficiently. They also charged a fair price for doing it. They are already going to get more of my business.
After they left for the day I went out to look at my yard. It was the same yard. It had the same dimensions and the same contours. Yet it was noticeably but not radically different. Not unlike, replastering and repainting can change a room. Now it was more open, brighter. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it but it was what it was.
It helped get a handle on something that I have been feeling lately. I have written a six novel series about a tough guy Private Eye from Boston. I have lived with and watched the character grow over six novels. I created a world for him, I can tell you exactly, everything about the furniture in his apartment. His favorite radio stations and TV channels/shows. His favorite beer is Lowenbrau and his favorite whiskey is Powers Irish Whiskey. He smokes unfiltered Lucky Strikes, and he’s the type of guy you’d want to hang out with in a dive bar at three in the afternoon. We’ve been roommates in my mind for awhile, me and Andy.
But I’ve also started a new series. The new series is set in some of the same old places Andy’s been to and knows. The whiskey is still Irish but not Powers and good luck finding Lowenbrau these days. My new guy is a little different too, he’d eat saw dust before he’d smoke a cigarette. If Andy just bangs around until the clues land on his head, like a ton of bricks, my new guy actually looks at something called “evidence”. Weird, right?
Writing a new character, a new series, after so long in one world, with one character it is a little strange. It’s also good too. It has potential. Kind of like when I stood at one end of my yard, staring at where my trees had provided privacy and shade.
Now the yard was open, bathed in late afternoon sunlight. I thought about the new plantings that would go in. Or maybe the pergola and firepit that LSW and I talked about putting in when we first bought the place. A new series, a new character and new opportunity felt very similar to what I was looking at in my backyard.