I checked the local weather report and while I’m trying to stay away from the news, I couldn’t help but notice a story about a woman not far from us who was severely injured during the recent wind storms.

It seems her and her husband and eight year old daughter went out in the midst of the storm to stake down their trampoline and it flew right into her, breaking bones and nearly killing her. 😯

Here’s the story:

Now, don’t get me wrong, I feel really bad for this lady and her husband and daughter, who I’m sure were both traumatized having witnessed what happened, but I couldn’t help but think to myself there is a really good lesson here.

And no, I don’t just mean it’s probably not a good idea to go out in the middle of a wind storm, which is why I heeded the weather service’s advice and stayed my butt inside. I figured whatever damage was going to happen would happen and I could clean up the mess later.

Thankfully, we sailed (no pun intended) right through it with no issues. Even my little greenhouse held up pretty well, which is surprising because last year we had to put a few panels back in after the spring winds came and blew it apart.

Hopefully it will be full of plants and flowers soon!

Our neighbors didn’t fare as well.

I think I mentioned their carport blew over but other than that, I didn’t see any other damage in the area. No trees uprooted, no shingles missing and, surprisingly, no vinyl fences blown over. That’s shocking since they always seem to be a casualty around here (and I’m not sure why people keep putting them up but they do).

But back to the lady and the trampoline. I immediately thought, you know, there’s a lesson in this!

When I heard there were wind storms on the way we immediately went out and got everything as ready as we could because we’ve lived through them before and we know what to expect.

Now most of us who are alive today, at least here in this country, haven’t really lived through actual, sustained, no-end-in-sight, collective hard times. Not like the ones our ancestors experienced. We’ve been quite spoiled for several decades now, maybe too spoiled, and we’ve become used to the idea that while we may have a bit of a recession or a housing bubble burst or a hurricane or tornado or whatever, nothing like the Great Depression has happened to us. Many of our generation mistakenly believe it could never happen again!

Well it could.

And it might.

So we all need to be prepared, just in case.

Of course you want to hope that nothing like that will happen again here, but realistically many of the signs are there that it is coming and will be global and worse than what our grandparents went through.

Far worse.

I know many people don’t like to think negatively or hear a bunch of “doom and gloom” but I look at it quite differently. I don’t find it to be depressing to realistically look at the state of things in the world and do my best to brace for impact in the same way we do when there’s a storm coming.

I don’t know about you, but it seems like everything in our lives these last several years has been pushing us towards being more self sufficient and prepared, even before we recognized it as such.

First, my health took a major nosedive and we started raising food for me to eat. I went from being almost completely bedridden and sick 24/7 to being relatively functional in a short time, and now I’m doing remarkably well all things considered, although I do still have my bad days.

In fact, sometimes I just have a few bad moments each day, like yesterday when my wrist started “anaphylaxing” for no reason whatsoever!

I didn’t do anything different than any other day, it’s just my immune system going haywire and I’m thankful it just decided to stay in one spot rather than spreading like it used to, sending me into degranulation hell and in need of an EpiPen or three.

In a way, my mast cell disease has been a blessing because not only did it prompt us to start raising chickens which led to us growing more food every year, starting back in 2015, but it also made me slow way down and reprioritize my values and my lifestyle.

We started really collecting antiques around that same time, too, and funny enough, most of the things we collected would come in really super handy in a worst-case-scenario. We didn’t even intend to buy all these things, but as an example, in just ONE haul we picked up all of the things you see up there in the top photo in this post.

If you look closely you’ll see a coffee grinder, hand mixers, food slicers, a kerosene can and in the background there’s one of several antique railroad lanterns – all of these are in great condition for their age and all are usable in a pinch.

We have a lot more, like a butter churn, ice cream maker, oil lamps, an antique sewing machine and so many other things I can’t even list them all. We don’t buy junk so all of them are functional and all of them we initially acquired as decorative, collectible items without realizing we were kitting ourselves out for bad times, should we ever face them.

Most of the things we got reminded us of our grandparents and we got them as a way to kind of pay homage to them, ironically enough.

Now, my entire house is basically a museum dedicated to their memory.

And in return, we are fortified against catastrophe in a lot of ways.

We are far from done, too. We plan to spend this summer looking for even more stuff now and will be hitting a lot of estate and yard sales and antiques stores to see what else we can find. We can always add more because if we can’t use it, someone else can.

Why bother?

Because now we know there’s a storm brewing and we don’t want to be like that lady who went out in the midst of it to stake down her trampoline. We want to be comfortably sheltered inside, safely watching it out the window until it blows over.

That’s the lesson to be learned here.