Meeting Ophelia, or Our First Hurricane

 9am Monday

 11am Monday

 1pm Monday

 3pm Monday

 5pm Monday

 7pm Monday

9am this morning

I decided that the tree right outside Mattman's window would be a good hurricane gauge- I was sure that by the end of Ophelia's dance through our country the tree would be completely bereft of leaves, and actually, out of all the trees in the garden, I thought it might be the one to topple. You'll see from the hardly dramatic results, that she shook us but spared us.

Ophelia did huff and puff and blow some houses in, but the tree fared very well all in all. The biggest casulaty was the orange man, who moved from the window to the wardrobe overnight, inexplicably to me. Teenage bedrooms. We fared well too. There has been great damage across the country- roof tiles from my parents' apartment block caused some commotion in the village at the bottom of our hill. Three people have died, and many are still without electricity. But I am sure that this is nothing on the scale of what countries are still managing across the wide Atlantic, whose distance curbs the violence for us. And certainly we stayed warm and safe all day long.



Schools were closed by our Department of Education yesterday and today, so we got the homework issue sorted in the morning, and spent the afternoon playing a most ingenious board game devised by Joshua to include most other board games in the house. We had to take comfort breaks. Then when Prince Charming finally made it home safely, an hour after the winds really hit hard, we settled down for the evening. There was Lego, and, as you can see, uninterrupted electricity.

I was so thankful for a society with an infrastructure that could cope (who needs working politicians, it would seem?), well-built houses, power, food and water. And thankful too that by lunchtime today, Ophelia had had her dervish and was gone. Driving beside the Lough this afternoon, it was hard to believe that just twenty-four hours before our hatches had all been battened down.

This piece of music captures the paradoxical quietness of the day for me- you can hear the storm recorded  beyond, but there was beauty still. Chris McCann is a local composer, music teacher, amazing drummer, and he lets Prince Charming play with him sometimes too!