It's raining ....

Well, it isn't raining men, but it's most definitely raining.

I find it fitting that the inaugural post in Tales from the Sunny South should be about an impending tropical storm and the preparation that precedes it.

I'm a native South Floridian save for a handful of years in Illinois as a newlywed. I've seen itty bitty storms and I've seen the Big One, Andrew back in 1992. We were fortunate enough to live far enough north of landfall that our biggest loss was a window my husband broke putting the plywood up over the windows. My in-laws down in Homestead weren't as fortunate. They lost their roof (all the way down to the plywood), their pool enclosure, and a storage shed that they never did find. We've always assumed that it ended up in the Gulf of Mexico.

Homestead was where the Florida Keys residents came to seek shelter when told that Andrew was going to decimate the islands. He didn't, and instead veered just enough north to wipe clean all the major landmarks. Homestead Air Force Base was gone-we'd just done music for a wedding there a month earlier. The Publix supermarket we shopped in with my mother-inlaw was gone. Stop signs, houses, trees ... it was all gone. We took them a generator a few days later and there were none of the usual visual clues as to how to find them. Our oldest son was almost 13 at the time and he was stunned and shaken.

Tropical storm Fay isn't the next big one for us, but as one of the newscasters urged: we 'practice like it is.' Supplies have been laid in since June, and on Saturday morning we topped them off with a few more items. Now? Now we sit back and listen carefully to the weather reports, and we stay close to home.