Hurricane Andrew hit Florida on this day 29 years ago

[malaise]

Damn time flies

[Deuxcents]

1. I can't believe it!

Hurricane Andrew changed a lot as far as building codes go but I think the emotional toll was so hard even for us locals. Mother Nature needs all due respect

[mcar]

2. We were there

Can't believe it's been 29 years but yeah, our oldest was 5, youngest not born yet.

I will never, as long as I live, forget the sound of that wind. And the frantic noise of the ducks and frogs being swept along by it.

[ProfessorGAC]

3. We Were There Earlier That Year

Late March.
We went back in '99 and as we were driving out of Homestead onto the stretch, I noticed buildings still missing.
Almost 3 years later, and it still looked like they took an airstrike.

[elleng]

4. Sure does, and my folks were living down there at the time;

messed up their 2 fruit trees and small vege garden, but nothing major. 'Coincidence,'? my cousin's name was Andrew, and his father was Henry.

67 years ago this coming Sunday, August 29 my folks were married (Dad married my soon to adopt me + brother.) This on Long Island. NO STORMS, and they soon sailed to Bermuda for honeymoon! Daring, EH???

[Moostache]

5. Good god...where did I put those 3 decades!?!?!?!?!

I am feeling the rush of time this week in a huge way - independent of the hurricane's tragic anniversary.

I have turned 50 and had my 25th wedding anniversary this year. I have one daughter out of college and one son entering college, one daughter and one son in high school (sophomore and junior) and my youngest daughter in the 8th grade.

The pandemic has cost us - a college graduation, a high school graduation, most of my son's senior year of High School including prom and our 25th anniversary trip we had planned since we married. A lot of milestones just obliterated by COVID-19 and the continuing aftermath...

Yet I also have recently began obsessing on a certain symmetry in my life as well...
1971 --> 1989 --> 1996 --> 2003 --> 2021

That is:
My Birth --> My HS grad. --> Married --> Son's born --> Son's HS grad.
My boy, today, is the same age as I was when I met his mother, 32 years ago, as a college freshman.
The years, from then to now, have gone by so fast it gives me vertigo sometimes. I have been blessed with a tranquil and fulfilling life, a family and career stuffed with so much more than I deserve that it awes me and puts me on my heels.

I also lost my mother to COVID-19 last November, and this week would have been her 76th birthday (Thursday). That left me confronting some very sad and lonely thoughts and still raw emotions (a lot of anger remains about the way things happened and how COVID remains for other reasons); but it also put a very weird kind of clock in my head...my mother passed at 75 years old, which would take my weirdly symmetric thoughts to a possible mortality table for myself of (maybe, if I am lucky) 2046, 25 years from now. I can easily understand the appeal or numerology now, but it also seems so fast and so accelerating at the same time.

I remember so much from my first 25 years, and so much MORE from my second 25 years...but the first 25 seem much longer than the second 25. Then I start thinking about mom and mortality, and my hoped for third 25 years and I get freaked out...the last 25 have gone in a snap...I am terrified that the next 25 (if I am granted them) will be over even faster.

[dclarston13]

6. Wow , I was at the FPL Turkey point plant

Doing a job, I was in containment and they told me to leave, but I could not until I was done. I was on one of the last flights out, good times! Man that plant was a mess after that storm.

[HipChick]

7. We lost everything..

About that time, I opened to the fact that material things don't really matter ..but family does

i revisited that again during these Covid-19 years...

[malaise]

8. Where were you?

Damn that must have been hard at the time - ad yes family is what matters.