Temperatures have hit >100 for a week in a row—it’s only June!—and we’ve been miserable around here. Thankfully, a tiny baby proto-hurricane (invest 93) wobbled around the Gulf, and we are getting some rain.

The new kitten, Jinx (oh hey, I should post about him) is very much perplexed by the Strange Sounds. His giant bat ears are swiveling around.

Here’s a storm memory:

Mom and Dad say that I have a lot of the details wrong about this one, but this is how I remember it:

We were living in Lynchburg, VA, and we went to Virginia Beach for a week. I was 5 or 6, I think. We stayed in a cottage that had no curtains. I remember it being so bright and sand-colored on the inside. We went to a beach shop and Mom and Dad bought me a bunch of really cool sand toys. The cottage was in a little “neighborhood” that had a pool. There were ant traps in the house. When we first got there, I shook one, and ants came out—a couple bit me, and Mom fussed at me for playing with them.

We were only there a couple of days, and there was a hurricane.

I remember a shockingly pale man, very skinny, in dark swimming trunks, standing on the diving board of the swimming pool, saying that we needed to leave. I remember that the sky behind him was dark and that there was lightning, and that I hadn’t been allowed to go in the ocean or the pool because of the lightning.

We packed up the car. I cried because I had to leave my brand-new sand toys behind, but Dad said we would be back (my sister was so small: I bet she doesn’t remember this). We drove to Norfolk, to Aunt Betty and Uncle Bev’s house.

The lived in an apartment high up in what I remember as a black, shiny building. Aunt Betty was in a wheelchair even then—she had a pair of giant wooden scissors with magnets on the “blades” that she used to reach things. I remember Uncle Bev as very tall and very taciturn, but he let me play with a Bingo set that had a cardboard shaker box filled with tiny orange pieces that had the bingo numbers on them.

It rained and rained: dark skies, dark building, shiny streets. Reaching things with those big wooden scissors and shaking small plastic bits from a box. I remember being there—the balcony (standing there with Dad), dimly lit rooms, Uncle Bev silhouetted against the sliding door—but nothing about where we slept, what we ate, how long we were there.

Mom tells me that we went back to the beach and I retrieved my sand toys.