I took Frankie for a walk Thursday morning. At the time I thought I should get him out there before the weather got bad. Unknown to me at the time the weather wouldn’t get bad for quite a while.

I saw on the map that the storm would pass us at its closest point around 3 p.m. We got a little rain and a little wind before then, but I was surprised by how mild it was. Then Frankie started to annoy me because he wanted to go outside. I never took Frankie for a walk twice in one day, but now, during the peak of the hurricane, he wouldn’t stop annoying me. I caved. I looked at the clock. It was 3:45. I looked out the window, saw the rain had stopped, and decided to take him out again.

At first, he hung around under the carport, not sure what he wanted to do, but then he decided to go.

After a while, the rain returned, so I picked him up and carried him home. He only hissed at me once.

To my surprise, the weather got worse after 6 p.m. By 6:30, the wind was blowing hard. Every ten or fifteen minutes, we would hear a loud bang from a tree branch falling on the roof. My next-door neighbor pointed out a tree across the street that had very large limbs broken off. It seemed just as windy at 9:30 when we went to bed.

In hindsight, three things happened that I didn’t consider. First, the winds trailing the storm are stronger than the winds ahead of the storm. This is because those winds travel across the water where no obstacles can slow them down. Second, the storm got stronger as it went farther north, so it was stronger at 6 p.m. than at 3 p.m. Third, the storm was a little slower moving than predicted.

The next morning, my wife wanted to go to the beach to look for shells, which are plentiful after a storm. We went outside before the sun came up, around 6:45. Even at that time I could see tree branches, big and small, scattered about our yard.

We thought there was a chance we would not be able to get to the beach. Sure enough, several police cars blocked access to the bridge. Later, it occurred to me that they needed to inspect all the bridges before reopening them.

We returned home just as it started getting light. On the way, we saw one home with its carport ripped off and lying on its roof. I took some pictures of the area near our house.

After taking pictures, I pulled some of the bigger pieces of debris from our yard and added them to the pile. I then went inside and found Frankie waiting to go outside.