Fortuitously, I happened to be in town for the hurricane, since Grandpa lives alone. Grandpa, about to turn 88 in a few weeks, still lives in a sprawling and rapidly decaying four-bedroom, three-bathroom, colonial-style home on four overgrown acres at the end of a dirt lane, a private road largely ignored by vital city services. Family has pressured him for years to sell the property because he is unable to maintain it. The routine maintenance of a house and lawn of this size is out of his reach and budget, and to compound the problem, he is a hoarder, which further explains his unwillingness to downsize. There would be nowhere to store all the stuff.

The items hoarded includes books, photographs, furniture, clothes, paper towels, cameras, film, paintings and empty frames, appliances, tools, obsolete stereo systems, automobiles, boxes and boxes of antiques and magazines, and so many random and unrelated items that it is hard to make sense of it all. It's a mess to me, but to Grandpa it is orderly and comfortable. He knows where everything is because it is all over the tabletops, counters, and floors. It is stuffed into every drawer, cabinet, and closet. It meanders down the stairs, across the fireplace mantle, and perches on the seats of broken office chairs.

The problem at hand isn't the clutter, it's the approaching hurricane, which by all accounts from the t.v. news, will certainly destroy the house, flood the yard, and blow away our very lives. I offer to take Grandpa to my mom's house to ride out the storm. He refuses. He feels safer in his own home. I can't argue that. Modern home construction, like what was used to slap together the homes in my mother's neighborhood, isn't known for its ability to withstand the effects of time, much less hurricane-force winds. So I make plans to stay with Grandpa during the storm.

The first thing we do on Wednesday is go to the supermarket where he gets his prescriptions filled to stock up on his medication and buy what he likes to eat. I found out that my Grandpa's diet primarily consists of powdered donuts, cookies, ice cream, bananas, Coca-Cola, coffee, and rice pudding. He has trouble walking since a fall two months ago so he rides the electric courtesy scooter around the store. I was caught off guard by this. I dropped him off at the front of the store and watched as he slowly, painfully, shuffled into the grocery. When I got back from parking the car, he was already in the scooter, hunched over the steering wheel and sporting a half-grin that said he was up to no good. Now, most old or disabled people using the scooters normally go slow. Not Grandpa. He flicked the button and rolled back on the throttle and was gone. I chased him all over the store, righting overturned displays and apologizing to victims of his bump-and-runs left in his wake. He paid and as he turned to leave the checkout lane, his gnarled hand reached under the bagging area to swipe a stack of paper grocery bags. He hoards these, too, preferring paper bags to plastic garbage bags. 

On Friday, I came over with ice and more water in preparation for the hurricane. Grandpa insisted not to worry, that he had supplies for everything else, flashlights, candles, canned goods, a radio, a propane stove, so I started going over these supplies. When Grandpa says he has something, there's no guarantee on it being in working order. He had dragged out the radio from the utility room. It was sitting on the floor and six D batteries were on the table above it. Six dead D batteries and his battery bin contained only three "good" D batteries that expired in 1996. Ok. So a radio wasn't that critical...we could use the car radio to get updates if necessary. Next item was filling jugs of water, the sink, and the washing machine so we'd have "water to flush the toilet." I heard him say it. Water to flush the toilet was what we agreed. On to the propane stove, which turned out to be an old Coleman model from the 1960s. Inspecting the rubber hose connecting the propane canister to the stove, I had some worries, but it looked like it would have to do. Thankfully, the two of the three flashlights had batteries and were working. 

On Saturday, the storm was here. We awoke to rain being driven against the windows by gusting winds and the swaying of the massive oaks and Virginia pines surrounding his home. Before noon, we lost electricity, meaning that we also lost water since the house has well water. That's when Grandpa took a trip to the kitchen. He gathered a bottle of white wine vinegar, a pitcher of water, and a roll of toilet paper, then proceeded to the back room. The back room is an enclosed back porch that he uses for, no surprise here, storage. In the middle of the mess stood a potty chair next to a plywood table. He opened the lid of the potty chair and poured in vinegar. I was trying to figure out what he was doing. He then poured in the pitcher of water. At last he plopped the toilet paper roll on the table in front of this undignified contraption and announced, "This is what we are going to use!" I made up my mind I was going to wait until dark and pee in the field. 

The storm raged on and I went to bed with a full bladder. Sometime in the wee hours I awoke to silence. The wind was gone and stars shone in the purple light of the early morning. I quietly got up and tried not to bump into things as I navigated the dark and narrow path to the back door. Outside, the air smelled like leaves, shredded leaves. All over the ground were tufts of leaves and small branches. Behind the camellia bush I lifted my dress and was immediately glad that I had escaped the potty chair. We were lucky all around. All of the trees in the yard were still standing. The house was standing. We were still standing.

In the morning, I went out to rake the driveway and clean the front yard of Grandpa's. The sunlight was beautiful and the neighbors were just starting to clean their yards, too. Generators, the one thing Grandpa didn't hoard, buzzed mightily at every house up the lane. Grandpa had his morning coffee and took a nap in the recliner, content that he was not alone and that his stuff was safe. I couldn't help but wonder what had happened to the rest of the people in the storm's path. It wasn't until the electricity came back a few days later that we learned that many people lost everything.