You could hear the ocean Saturday night from my back door. We had the door open because it was sheltered from the storm, and the roar you could hear outside sounded exactly like the surf crashing on the beach.

There was no surf, of course.  The roar was from a mixture of 30-mile-per-hour continuous wind and stinging rain. And when I woke up in the middle of the night Saturday to a house without power, the wind had increased and now had that train-like sound that people mention when they talk about tornadoes. But that train kept running for hours and hours, interrupted only by the occasional SNAP of a big tree limb or the BANG of an exploding transformer. If that sounds frightening, it’s only because it was.

In the morning, my yard looked like Nature’s own barbershop floor. There was stuff everywhere but it was easy enough to sweep away. I’ll have to get up on the roof to yank out a little branch that is stuck in the weather vane, but once again, things could have been much worse. They were for people who lived closer to the ocean, especially folks along the Delaware Bay or the Jersey shore, where a hurricane hasn’t hit for many years.

And today was a magnificent late summer day, full of sunshine and pleasant temperatures and a breeze that still had the scent of the ocean about it. People walked through the neighborhood in a way you don’t usually see, as much out of boredom as anything else because no one had power. That was rectified in a few hours and we all went back to our TVs and iPads. And I felt glad to get through the whole experience unscathed.