We just finished lunch and Billy is on couch next to me talking to his sister on the phone and he’s saying, “A whole lot of nothing.” Most of the storm looks as if it heading to the west of us. Buffalo will get a little more and for everyone this far north, the winds are not as strong as they feared. So for us, at least, it is a rainy week and nothing more. In Maryland our little house is safe too, though just across the road Billy’s sister is without power and there are a couple of trees down across her driveway. My brother in NYC is very close to an evacuated zone and the fires, and he is fine- they never lost power. This is the storm my grandmother always feared. She would have been a wreck worrying about us all. Her house in Stone Harbor, NJ is surely flooded- reports came in that the water was eight feet high there and our house, which isn’t really ours anymore though I still think of it that way, is a few feet from the beach.

I must have inherited my grandmother’s worrying gene. I’m exhausted from the preparations and for a  couple of hours tomorrow I will pretend we don’t have power and lie near a window and read my book. “Come what may” (thank you Shakespeare)  needs to be my new motto. I’ve decided to defy to worry gene.

. . . . .

A few weeks ago I brought a yearling ewe in from the pasture. She had a parasite in her spine that sheep catch from deer and snails which made her unable to use her back legs. I’ve been taking care of her in the barn for about a  month  and she has done fairly well. Other than not being able to get up she now appears to be fine and is perfectly happy. I was beginnig to imagine she might last for years in this state. Last week I saw a small movement in her back legs as she pulled herself to a new position but I had already given up hope. Then yesterday when I went into the barn in the morning, I was shocked to see her standing!