After the Cyclone - Part 3

The day after the cyclone was Wednesday and that night, there was a thunderstorm. We’re not talking about a thunderstorm where there’s a little bit of thunder and lightning, we’re talking about a thunderstorm that doesn’t stop for a few hours and lightning that keeps flashing as though someone had a spotlight and kept peering into our house.In fact, that night there was a metre of rain - that's 1,000 ml of rain!!! Most people think 100ml of rain is a lot! Milly retreated to her safe place in the laundry and coped less with the thunderstorm than she had with the cyclone. I must admit that I was ‘over’ everything when the thunderstorm arrived. It was as though, “Seriously?! We have to have more of this?!”

We woke up to rain, no water, no power, no phone, internet service but we heard that there was one supermarket out of 3 that was operational and headed down there, as did most of the town. The queues were aisles long and there wasn’t much in the way of water and long life milk for sale. We bought pears and apples and cold diet coke! Yay. I had been drinking water to that point because I don’t like warm coke but Andy has a caffeine addiction so had been drinking warm coke zero as well as water. We stopped in at Matt’s and he gave us a bag of ice which was gratefully received.

After we had unpacked the very few staples we had bought, we walked to Matt and Lauren’s as their road had become a main thoroughfare since the main road was blocked off due to fallen trees or road damage after the cyclone. I walked a bit behind Andy and was able to see the “Dog man walking” in action. He waved constantly to cars who were waving or tooting at him, big smiles on their faces! It was like watching Santa Clause in action. By the time we arrived at Matt’s, we were drenched in sweat. It was so hot and humid! I found out we had phone access and I texted the 20 or so people who had been trying to contact me and caught people up on Facebook, with a state we were in.

Someone who had been through cyclones up here before, said it was the worst they’d ever experienced. Someone else said that unless you’d been through it, you can not begin to understand what it was like. A friend messaged me and shared with me her feeling of despair and pain and when I offered to meet with her, she came immediately. We had a wonderful time of sharing stories and when she left, she reassured me she felt encouraged.

Andy came home after helping someone move tree stumps and wondered how I was coping. I reassured him that I was fine and although he smiled and said that was good, in his mind he was wondering when it would ‘hit me’.