Wood You Say......?

In the quiet middle of the night a few days before Cappy went back on 'da boat' this last time, just as I was settling back in bed, wedging myself between the dawgs and Cappy again, after having made a quick trip to the bathroom, there was a loud clattering somewhere in the house. Something had fallen. What the heck? How could something have fallen? And in the middle of the night? I yawned and snuggled my head back under the blankets to try to get warm. (When Cappy is home, he likes the house cool, so we have the A/C cranked, and the fan going as well, to keep the snowflakes from it, evenly dispersed around the room....giggling here, cuz I know when he gets home and reads this, he'll probaby roll his eyes or something.)
But what was that racket a minute ago? What could have fallen that made that kind of noise? I couldn't sleep...I hadda know. When I got to the hall, I heard the toilet running like crazy. Oh gosh, it's good I got up or that thing would have cost us a ton of money running like that all night. After jiggling the handle, I was walking through the hall and noticed something on the floor in the middle of this computer/guest room. I turned on the light and saw it was a plaque that I had gotten in Sunday School, in Olean, NY when I was a very little girl. It has a picture of a little girl holding a robin on her finger, and she is saying, "Jesus Loves Me". I picked up the plaque, smiled and said to Him, "I know You do". I still can't figure how it fell off from behind the shelf where I keep it, way into the middle of the room like that. As I crawled back into the blankets, I was thinking that perhaps that happened, as so many other times in the past, to let me know that if He cared about small things like the toilet water running furiously all night, that I could be assured that He would also take care of us in the midst of the bigger things in life. Kind of a "just letting you know ahead of time" thing.
And sure enough, a few days later, He did take care of us again. I had been rushing around doing things in anticipation of traveling north to New York State to visit, when the 'thought' came, "Are you going to die in this Storm?" Where had that come from? What storm? I hadn't watched tv for a few days, so out of curiosity, I turned on the weather channel and was horrified to see that an hurricane, already named Katrina was headed this way!
I rushed around packing things, called Bekah, who lives in New Orleans, who only just recently moved down from up north and doesn't know what to in the case of hurricanes, either. Together, she and I quickly picked things up outside to prevent them from becoming missiles during the storm, packing them into the shed or into the house; plants, chairs, flower boxes, flower pots, ladders, bird feeders, bird bath, patio table, the dog's swimming pool (that wasn't fun). Cappy, on the phone, said he was worried the boat would roll away because the trailor it's on is moved so easily, just by lightly pushing it. He told me to put 2x4's in front and in back of each wheel. (He had said, wearily, "I'm seriously afraid that we'll never see our boat again." He loves that boat, and from his youth, has never been without a boat.)
After having done all that, we headed out north and west, with no real destination. We took back roads to avoid the slowly moving "parking lots" on the regular highways. Just as we gave up, exhausted and tried to sleep at a rest area, near Marshall, Texas, Bekah's step-father, a good friend of our's, Chuck, pulled some strings and got us a very nice hotel suite in Dallas, where we spent three nights. Since the Winsor Court in New Orleans, where Bekah was recently hired as a pastery chef, was obviously out of commision, and her apartment on St. Charles was definitly in harm's way, she and her 2 cats boarded a plane for Utah, where her mother and Chuck live, until things calm down around here.
SparkyBear, MarkyBear and I got home 2 days later, after learning that we were one of the first towns to get elec. back.
There was no real damage at all that I could discern on our property. Trees were downed in yards around us. A tree and fence five feet away from our house and shed were blown down. Branches from the neighbor's trees are still all over our yard. The wind must have been roaring through here.
As I swept the carport, of the leaves and branches of our neighbors, I had to move the 2x4's away from the wheels of the boat's trailor. .......(!) Wait a minute. How is it, that the wind was so bad that it knocked down trees right and left, high and low....but never moved those light little plaques of 2x4 wood? They were exactly where I had placed them. Normally, they would have been the first thing I would have put in the shed, not wanting them to fly off INTO a neighbor's house during a hurricane.
Then the thought came to me. The Lord has always used Wood to show us how much He Loves us.