"A Foul Wind Is Blowing"

When I was ten years old my family moved forty miles inland from Tampa where we had lived since my parents made their pilgrimage from Kentucky. Though we moved to Florida five years previous to the move inland, we never had enough money to move to a neighborhood better than the one where we lived. Dad tried everything to relocate his family to a better location but it seemed like something financially binding was always coming up at the last minute keeping him from it.

He struggled for those five years trying to make a better life for his family and it took that many years living in a housing project to save enough money to buy an acre and a half of land in the country. His boss gave him a loan with little interest to buy the material it took for him to begin the construction of our new house.

Our new community was called Durant, Florida and the population at the time was all of 250 but that's exactly what our parents wanted for their four children. They hoped for a small, close knit town where everyone knew everyone else's business. They wanted small country schools where teachers were more likely to have one on one experiences with their students and they thought the country was the place to do it.

It was terribly hard in the beginning for everyone. My mom and two older brothers stood toe to toe with Dad building the house. Mom was everything from chief cook and bottle washer to a tool gopher. My brothers, Ronald and Jerry, carried shingles to the roof, mixed cement and did anything and everything Dad needed them to do.

It didn't sound very glamorous at the time but my job was to care for my two year old brother Terry while they worked. You can imagine all the things a two year old can get into when you're building a house, like the time he dropped an entire box of building nails down an open drain pipe the toilet was meant to sit on. It then became my job to tie a magnet on a string and go fishing, so to speak, for all the nails. I was, after all, supposed to be keeping him from doing just that sort of thing. He wasn't a hyper child but he kept me jumping when the rest of the family was building the house.

Finally, after months of building, we were able to make the move. We were living in the city when Dad started building but would camp out weekends on the new property as he built.

We were finally able to make the move complete as soon as Dad put the roof and windows in. The concrete floors were without tile, there was only two by four studding where the walls were supposed to be and, yes, we had an outhouse until the plumbing was finished.

Dad dug a well and connected an electric pump on it for our water supply then added a small room to the back of our new house for the purpose of housing the pump. It was called the pump house but actually it was used to keep anything we didn't have a place for at the time.

Neighbors were few and far between in the country but I made friends with a young girl next door who was my age and we got along really well. She had a younger brother a couple years older than Terry and our parents became friendly with their parents.

Dad was trying to finish the house as he got the extra money to do so. First, and foremost, was the plumbing. Though I can never remember her complaining about it, using an outhouse and carrying water from the pump had to have been hard on Mom. I can remember her washing our clothes in an old wringer washer that was sitting out back in the yard. She would fill it with water from the hose to do the laundry. I also remember her heating pans of water to pour in a large metal tub on the back porch so we could bathe. Yes, I'm sure Mom was glad to see the plumbing come first.

Next the drywall went up and we finally had real walls, not the blankets we nailed to the two by fours for privacy in the bathroom where Dad later moved the old metal tub for bathing. You would have thought Dad gave my mother diamonds from the way she reacted to the walls.

Dad had just put down the tile floors when we heard about Hurricane Donna on the television. She was going to be a real barn burner the reports said and she was headed our way.

"We're forty miles inland...don't worry about it." My dad told my mother who worried about everything. "We may get a little rain and wind, that's all." He told her.

In the next few days reports of Donna were getting more and more frightening. All the neighbors buzzed about how they were going to the National Guard Armory for protection as they had with past hurricanes.

"Oh, Howard, can't we go to the armory too?" Mom asked. "The neighbors said they've had hurricanes in the past that have done enormous damage to their home...I'm afraid for the children."

"The neighbors don't live in this concrete block house either. It's going to take more than a little wind to damage this place." He tried to convince her. I remember one of the boys getting in trouble when he mocked our father saying, "He huffed and he puffed but he couldn't blow the three little pigs house down."

I grew up in a house where my father was boss. My mother was allowed to say whatever she pleased, whenever she pleased, but the decision to go or stay was entirely my father's.

"We're gonna ride it out." He said. "We'll be fine...now no more's gonna be said on the subject. I won't have some looter come in and take what things we worked so hard for."

"That's in the city, Howard, there won't be looters here." Mom tried to convice him.

"Enough said!" Dad emphatically stated and that was the end of the conversation.

Hurricane Donna was due to hit our area of the state during the night. This, to me, even made all the hype more frightening. I had visions of being carried off like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. My older brothers, of course, had to play on my fears or they couldn't have looked at themselves in the mirror the next day.

After hours of teasing and tormenting me about the fact I was going to be blown away, Mom finally laid the law down. "Stop it now or you will wish the hurricane carried you off instead of me getting a hold on you." She told them.

Mom did a lot of threatening but never carried anything out. She would however, take the argument to our father and he would settle it. We did NOT want her to do that so the fussing abated.

As if wearing a timepiece, Donna was right on time. Mom was afraid to put us to bed in our rooms because of a big oak tree that was beside the house. She was convinced it would fall across the roof and kill us all in our sleep.

"I'm letting the children sleep in the living room floor." She told Dad. "I'm afraid to put them in their rooms."

"Whatever..." Dad answered. "but I don't see what all the excitement's about. It's just a hurricane, you know yourself we've rode out many tornadoes in Kentucky. If we lived through them we'll surely make it through a lot of wind and rain that has forty miles of land to slow it down."

Mom said we older kids could sit in the floor and play cards if we behaved ourselves but Terry was already asleep and sprawled out on the living room sofa so we'd have to be quiet. We didn't want to go to sleep when something as gut wrenching as a hurricane was going to blow through. Besides, it was another opportunity for my brothers to torment me and any amount of sleep was worth sacrificing for that.

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