Matt and Joan

Sitting in my living room watching the evening news most of this week as Hurricane Matthew continues to wreak havoc and other clichés of destruction in an ever widening radius, realizing from the local forecasters we here in The Land of Steady Habits will see next to nothing in terms of adverse effects.

I'm not unhappy to hear that as I like my weather nice enough to walk around outside with nothing more on than a light jacket (during the winter) and considerably less than that in the summer months (all while wondering why my neighbors pray for blindness and/or darkness), but my Mom has settled in down in Florida through one of the corridors these things tend to rush through and Matthew is severe and she is my Mom.

Mom raised six of us (think 'cat rodeo' without the cats), survived multiple bouts of breast cancer (the belts are in the trophy case) and almost thirty years of marriage with our Dad before he died so if I were a betting man, I wouldn't put too much money on Matthew, or on any other meteorological  depression, getting the better of her, but I have been known to light candles more out of habit than devotion and then admire their flame.

I called her Wednesday evening and she had just finished putting the hurricane shutters up on her house and was a little out of breath from that and very much out of patience with Matthew for the oceans of commotion these storms always stir up. She sounded okay on the phone but mentioned she had a fallback location on the far side of Jupiter, the city in Florida where she lives, not the planet, farther away from the ocean than she is.

Mom walks across A1A every morning to go to the beach so I think farther away is in the eye of the beholder but I've decided to keep my thoughts to myself on that subject. She spent so much of her life worrying about me and my brothers and sisters, the least I can do, I suppose, is to slap a tight smile over my big mouth and make sure to keep it closed while she rides out this storm.
-bill kenny