Clearwater Journals

The Storm

The Storm

Thunder was crashing and rain was beating hard upon the tile roofing when I snapped out of my deep sleep. I looked around and momentarily tried to recall where I was. Paper was strewn all around me. When I sat up, more spilled off the bed onto the floor. The single bulb of the overhead light flickered uncertainly, made a valiant effort to revive and then simply died. Almost immediately, there were several sharp raps on my interior door. The door knocking startled me more than the thunder. I had forgotten all about the woman who owned the place. The noisy crashes of thunder and flashing lightening and finally the electric power outage must have frightened her.

"Joseph-Joe are you in there?" her voice quavered. This woman was really frightened.

My landlady and housemate, Mrs. Reilly, was a relatively well off widow who must have been somewhere in her late fifties or early sixties. My impression of her, during the few times I had actually seen her, was that she was very fragile-and most probably-a total ditz. She was not much more than five feet tall and could not have weighed more than a hundred pounds in a lead lined dressing gown. During one of our few conversations, she had informed me that she was a vegetarian and a health food addict. I knew that she took more supplements than Bayer has aspirins. She only wore clothes that were white, lavender or lilac and always with a single strand of cultured pearls. Her shoes invariably were white low heels. When she went outside on a sunny day, she wore white gloves-on a cloudy day, black gloves. Her thin curly brown dyed hair was always neatly coiffed and seemed to suggest that she was expecting a date or important company or perhaps getting ready to go to church. The few words that we had exchanged had been stiffly formal but always quite pleasant. We respected each other's privacy-at least until now.

"Joe, Joe..." tears seemed imminent.

"Yeah, I'm here er ..." What the hell was her first name again? "I'll be right there."

I struggled in the dark to my interior door, the one I used only when I needed to shower in the larger bathroom across the hall, and opened it. Mrs. Reilly was standing in the corridor shaking. She was holding a molded yellow rubber nine-volt, high intensity lantern. The bright light almost blinded me as I swung open the door and took its full blast in my face. I blinked a few times. Then, she was in my arms.

"I'm so sorry, but these kind of intense electrical storms still terrify me," she mumbled into the bottom of my chest. "My home in Michigan burned to the ground when I was a little girl during a lightning storm just like this. My youngest brother, Seth, died in that fire."

Florida in the late summer and fall would not be my first choice as a place to be if you want to avoid thunder and lightning storms-to say nothing of the crazy hurricanes.

"It's okay," I said quietly. "We'll be fine Mrs. Reilly. With that thousand-watt beacon you have, we'll be able to find lost ships at sea. We'll be the heroes of Clearwater Beach. They'll write heroic stories about us for years to come. The storm will pass soon." Prophetic me-the lights flickered on again, off again and then held. Power restored. "I'm sorry Mrs. Reilly; I've forgotten your first name. I don't see you often. And I guess the storm has frightened me too."

It sounded lame, but the truth was that I always entered my room through the exterior door on the garage side of the house. The room had its own en suite washroom-which was the typical real estate hyperbole to describe a toilet and a sink and shower in a four by five foot closet. I was away from the place as much as possible. And when I was home, I rarely remembered that Mrs. Reilly might be haunting the other rooms of the house. The property management guy had told me that she was harmless, just a little off the wall and quickly losing whatever marbles remained. I didn't bother her, she didn't bother me. The only time I invaded her space was when she went out gardening or to do her morning walk. Then, I would sneak across the hall wrapped in a towel and take my morning shower in the larger bathroom. It was a functional arrangement.