It isn’t as if we weren’t warned. Hurricane preparedness information is stamped on milk cartons, tucked inside electric bills, broadcast on radio and television, and takes up all of page 2 in the telephone book. Or so I found out at midnight when I could no longer ignore Hurricane Flossie’s direct aim at my porch.

Two years ago this month the world was mesmerized by the horrors of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a Category 3 storm. Now Flossie, a Category 4, was roiling westward from Mexico toward the dangerously warm water of my Hawaiian island.

“It will probably miss us,” my husband said late last night. “Most likely it will break up if it swings north. We’ve been lucky so far.”

I suggested we were whistling in the dark because we did not want to take down our big woodworking tent overflowing with drills, sanders, saw horses, screws and varnish. We also didn’t want to haul the lawn furniture into the living room, drive scrap lumber to the dump, or board up windows.

To forestall action, we were depending on local TV weather forecasters who were parroting meteorologists at the Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu, whose best guess was that Flossie would miss us.

But what if….?

Watching scores of frigate birds circle and dive above our heads – a sure sign of a major sea change – we decided not to ignore a 50-mile-wide storm packing 135 mile-per-hour winds just a day away. If Flossie fell apart before she reached us, great; if she didn’t, Katrina taught us we’d have to take care of ourselves, because nobody was likely coming to our rescue, at least right away.

I found sturdy black plastic garbage bags to protect our photo albums, remembering that all disaster survivors lament the loss of family pictures. I dug out our hurricane and homeowners’ insurance policies, kicking myself for not increasing coverage because of the extra cost, and put them in another plastic bag. I put my 25th wedding anniversary pearls with my toothbrush in case I had to evacuate our house.

Piling all our candles in the middle of the dining room table, I decided it was better to have an olfactory overdose on lavender and jasmine-scented wax than sit in the dark.

“What about extra batteries?” I yelled out the door as I heard the woodworking tent collapse in a heap.

“Huh?” said Dean, climbing out from underneath it.

He loaded the truck for the dump and headed to town with a list of necessities – batteries, matches, bags of ice, masking tape. Surely the general store’s shelves weren’t already picked clean.

Our freezer was full; we had plenty of charcoal to barbeque and propane for the stove. The rubber tank supplying our pressure pump brimmed with clean water. We’d just filled two five-gallon gas cans for the lawn mower. The laptop had a new battery. All medical prescriptions had been renewed. We’d even bought a hand-cranking radio whose wind-up noise always made the dog howl.

Dumb luck; I had a new paperback thriller to get me through the storm.

None of us likes to think we’re vulnerable, but living on a 727-square-mile speck of volcanic rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 2,500 miles from the nearest land mass, there’s no place to run. If our sturdy laundry room couldn’t protect us our fallback shelter was a 150-year-old missionary church with three-foot-thick rock walls.

We felt slightly foolish – real hurricanes only hit Florida and the Gulf Coast, right? – until we remembered that in 1992, Hurricane Iniki killed six people and caused $2.5 billion worth of damage to the island of Kauai.

Best-case scenario is that we’d get drenched by much-needed rain from a down-graded tropical storm and benefit from a dress rehearsal for a future hurricane. Worst-case scenario? We chose not to think about one.

As I write this, the surf is picking up on the rocks below the house and the salt-saturated breeze is stiffening, but the sky is still awash in glowing planets and twinkling stars.

Throughout the evening, and now late into the night, I’ve moved to the porch to behold the Perseids meteor shower, an annual August spectacle astronomers say peaked tonight.

Space.com reports that “the (Perseids) cosmic rivers of debris have been laid down for millennia by the comet Swift-Tuttle, whose orbit has been traced back nearly 2,000 years and is now thought to be the same comet that was observed in 188 A.D., and possibly even as early as 69 B.C.”

“Perseid meteoroids, which are often as small as a grain of sand, are exceptionally fast, entering Earth's atmosphere at roughly 133,200 mph (60 kilometers per second) relative to the planet, slamming into the air like bugs hitting a windshield.”

Every few seconds a falling star flared up in the black sky, then flamed out, its life cycle complete. It is reassuring to know that this same cosmic wonder has been observed by humans perhaps as long as we have inhabited the Blue Planet.

While waiting for a hurricane, it’s advisable to take the long view.

Will update you once the hurricane passes us.

Read the National Hurricane Center ‘s Hurricane preparedness Family Disaster Plan

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To read more about Tad, go to TadBartimus.com.