We are all watching the hurricane off the Florida coast.  The pictures of the Bahamas are gut wrenching.  It looks like nothing is left.

Today they are saying it may hit the S. Carolina coastline.  Which prompted a memory that I had totally forgotten.

When I lived in Beaufort S.Carolina, halfway between Savannah and Charleston,  I knew nothing about hurricanes.  I was an Oklahoma girl.  Tornadoes were the type of wind disaster I knew about, and a hurricane didn't look too bad to me.  

It was slow.  You had days and days of warning.  You knew what to prepare for and by the time it hit, you had time to evacuate.

Well, we had a hurricane.  I don't remember the name of it.  I don't even remember being concerned about it.  My mom was concerned!!  She called and called warning me about it.  Telling me to leave.

We were living on base, and the Marines came and boarded up our windows with plywood.  I thought the whole thing was interesting.

And the Marine pilots did what needed to be done.  They flew every single airplane inland.  And left their women and children to weather the storm.  They sat at an airbase somewhere in Tennessee (as I recall) and played Acey-ducey until it was over and then flew the airplanes back into Beaufort.

I had been a Marine pilot's wife for seven or eight years by then.  Having the pilots leave with the planes didn't seem strange to me at the time.  Looking back, I should have thrown the kids in the car and driven home to Oklahoma.  We lived on the water.  It could have been a disaster, but the storm didn't hit us.  God takes care of idiots.