Bye, bye, Matthew!

Here's our hurricane report. Before the hurricane came, we had gone to Joe's in Orlando to tend the grandkids while their parents enjoyed a second honeymoon in Puerto Rico for the week. When the residents of Flagler County were warned they might get a direct hit for the first time ever, Sage and her family joined us for a hurricane party. We hung out, sang songs and danced, ate great food, and the two families sang and danced as they took turns competing in cleaning up. Life at Joe's place is like living in a musical. Some even went to parties. The only evidence of a hurricane was a new lake in the golf course in the back yard. The grandkids had a great time bonding with each other.

After listening to the radio reports, we wondered what we would find when we returned home two days after the hurricane passed our place. We found the cows and horses were in our yard mowing the grass (a gate had blown open but luckily our front gate was closed), the fence hiding our garbage cans had blown down, and the tower the boy scouts had tied together one summer ago had partially blown down. We also didn't have electricity until the following Tuesday. However, we had a generator so we had water from the well and the food in the fridge stayed fresh or frozen.

Not everyone else was so lucky, especially those closer to the shore. So for the next two weekends, we joined 1200 Mormon Helping Hands in yellow shirts to cut up fallen trees, clean up yards, and otherwise make things more livable. The first weekend, the helpers came to our county and Daytona from the Orlando and the Gainesville area. Joe even came over from Orlando with his ward. This past weekend, they were from the Miami area. There were lots of widows, single mothers, sick and elderly who felt that angels had arrived, or so they said. We would be given a work order, go do the work and then go down the street offering help. We haven't been to church for two weeks except for a song and a prayer since the free "helping hands" were our church service. This week things should be back to normal.

At Sage's, the backyard fence around the pool blew down. Water also blew in under the door, soaked the carpet in the piano room, and stunk up the place a bit so they spent a couple of days at our place until the electricity was back on and they could air out the house.

We had to wait a week to check Joe's condo as no one was allowed to cross the bridges to the barrier island. When we were able to cross over and take various detours because of washed out roads along the shore, we found that his condo had no damage at all except that the blades on the fan on their porch were blow off. However, the protective sand dune was blown away. You can now see people on the beach from their balcony. The creek on the condo side of where the the dune was (we used to be able to find turtles and other creatures there when crossing over from the beach) now looks like an overflowing sandy river and their beach now has coquina rocks rather than sand where the waves hit the shore.