BE PREPARED

Super blood moons, the shemitah, the idiot behavior of secular leaders, aggressive foreign governments, the threat of pandemics, signs, symbols, and portents, and you’ve got the last days folks. Oh, I don’t mean it’s the end of days.

I mean, that no matter who you are or what you believe, your days are numbered.

Deal with it.

“Why you always getting ready for the apo[p]alypse, YaYa.” Conner (age 8) wanted to know.

“Because I watch the ‘Walking Dead,’ kid. That’s why.”

It was a joke, kind of.

Actually, I’m a prepper because I’m not stupid and experience has taught me and I have learned and that makes me teachable.

My grandparents lived through the great depression in Chicago, Illinois. My grandfather watched business men jump to their deaths in the financial district. He thought it was people throwing garbage out of the windows. The depression changed them. They saved string, tinfoil, paper, Kentucky fried chicken buckets, and silver coins, which they buried in the backyard in an ammo box.

When I was child, my father came home from his job at Cape Canaveral in the middle of the day. He and my mother sat at the Formica kitchen counter discussing whether or not they would be joining the evacuation of Florida because of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world teetered on the edge of nuclear devastation. They opted to stay in our home on Rose Marie Drive in Titusville and ride it out. Besides A1A was a parking lot, jammed with cars of South Floridians trying to escape. It was too late to leave.

When I was a young mom, hurricane Andrew flattened South Florida. My husband went with members of our church to help with the cleanup. He came home talking about honeybees. When the relief workers sat down to eat their lunches, bees swarmed their sodas looking for sugar. There were no flowers left. The hurricane had blown all the flowers away.

Ten years ago, hurricanes crisscrossed our state, forming a kind of giant X on the map where they all intersected. We lived at the center of the X, and X absolutely marked the spot.

I have watched the devastation of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, wars and rumors of war on my television, and I’m not so arrogant to believe that it could never happen to me and mine. Of course it can.

So, I pay attention. I don’t panic. I don’t run to the mountains to hole up in my underground bunker. (What bunker? What have you heard?) Slowly and surely, I add a few things to my food storage every month, preparing for whatever ill wind may blow through. That’s all.

“Be prepared.”  It’s the Scout motto and a good one.