I've been thinking of writing an autobiography or memoir, but it just never comes together for me, but I figured if I write one story at a time and post it on my blog maybe once a month, I can do that. Maybe one day I'll pull all the stories together and put them in a book but for now I'll just share some stories with you about my childhood and into adulthood. Some of the stories will be happy, some sad and some horrific because that was my childhood. But they will all be real, things that actually happened. If it seems like something that people enjoy reading maybe, I'll keep it going. These stories will not be in any kind of order; I'll just write them as they come to me.
Hurricanes I've been in
I've told you before that when my parents split and divorced, I ended up living with my grandma for almost 2 years. My dad didn't want me or my brother living with him because he wanted to date a bunch of women. My mom had a boyfriend named Larry and he hated me and didn't want me living with he, my mom and my little brother, and my mom went along with it. So, my grandma took me in for a while. I lived with her when I was 11-13 years old. During that time there were a couple of hurricanes in California where we lived.
In September of 1982 California was hit with a category 4 hurricane named Olivia. I was living in Redondo Beach, California at the time with my grandma. I remember my grandpa coming over and boarding up some of the windows of our house. He stayed with us for a couple of days while the hurricane passed. They weren't a couple at the time, but you could tell they really cared about each other.
I mostly remember all the rain, wind and flooding. Trees in my grandma's yard fell over, tiles flew off the roof and the fence in the back yard fell over in parts. The wind was the scariest part. I was 12 years old and had never seen wind like that before. When parts of the fence fell in the back yard and some of the wood started slamming up against our house, me and my grandparents went outside and took the wooden slats and threw them over the fence into the vacant lot next door so they wouldn't keep slamming up against the house and wouldn't break the windows. The wind was absolutely nuts. It was hard to hold onto anything let alone big pieces of wood from the fence, but I helped as much as I could. Back then I thought of my grandparents as old, but I realize now that they were the same age I am right now! That's crazy to think about.
Then the next year in August of 1983, we got rain and wind from Hurricane Ismael which at the time it came over us was a tropical depression, but I remember being scared because I thought the same thing was going to happen again. Thankfully it didn't and while there was a lot of rain and wind, it wasn't anywhere as bad as the previous year.
I've been in other storms but nothing like Hurricane Olivia.
Have you been through a hurricane?
Links to past stories
2023
2024
