JANUARY 16, 2022–The Gulf worked itself into a tumultuous uproar this morning. The wind stirred the waves into some serious white caps, as compared to the normally quiescent action of the water’s meeting Florida’s west coast.

We think of rain pouring down, but this morning it blew sideways rearranging lanai furniture in a nonsensical contortion. This was not an ordinary rain storm. It was malicious.

Then the alarms began their hideous beeping… tornado warnings, they were. Up on the eighth floor of the building those beeps seemed to impart a more serious tone ! I guess it was just the distance of the drop from there to ground level.

What’s the expression? Built like a brick sh-t house. Certainly that would apply to this building, but that seems of small consolation when contemplating the thought of it getting whacked by a tornado. There is no good result !

For starters, we thought, get to the ground floor while the elevator still works. My wheelchair doesn’t work very well going down stairs ! So down we went. A message on the cell phone indicated that a tornado watch would last for about a half hour.

In the meantime, the ground floor did seem safer than the eighth. Curiously though, no one else in the building agreed. Jude and I were the only ones down there. So we slung the bull for half an hour and back up we went. Indeed, a look outside appeared as though the weather had backed off a little.

In little more than a few minutes, there went those hideous beeps again. Yes, the cell phone indicated the tornado watch to be back on.Yes, back on the elevator we went, fortunately with no interruption of electricity. This second tornado watch lasted for twenty minutes. Again, we were not joined by anyone else in the building.

I started to question the bizarre nature of this whole exercise. Was Nature rendering some quizzical lesson here? The vicissitudes in humankind’s propensity to conform. Why wasn’t anybody coming to the ground floor? Surely others knew what was going on. Were we the idiots or were they ? If someone told you right now to go jump in a lake, would you do it ?

Wouldn’t you know it? After returning back to the eighth floor, that damned alarm sounded a third time. Back down stairs we re-entered the realm of the absurd; anticipating the tornado that never was and was never wanted.

We came to find out that a twister was spotted in the Golden Gate section of Naples. Undoubtedly that is as close as we ever wish to come to one of these beasts! Waiting in the stairwell was bad enough.