By David Fortier 

Come Sunday morning we will have braced ourselves for Hurricane/Tropical Storm Henri, meaning cleaning up the porches and yard for any items that might get kicked up into the air when the winds arrive. 

The night before Mary and I babysat baby boy grandchild while his parents went out for an anniversary dinner at favorite restaurant. Of course, they dined outside, properly distanced, which made them feel pretty good about getting out. 

We arrived home just after 11 p.m., already in that pre-hurricane frame of mind, planning to hunker down for the next day, curious about how things might work out. When we rose, and the rain had started, we each checked the activity. We wound up eating brunch on the porch. For a few minutes, we listened online to police and fire activity. 

At one moment, a police car raced up the street, sirens blaring.  

Most of the time, we commented on the wind and how the trees began to sway more and more, and how the water on the street began to form rivulets.  

It wouldn’t be long before the governor came on the radio and announced that Henri had come ashore in Westerly Rhode Island, where there were 70,000 or so outages. I checked the Eversource and United Illuminating outage sites and saw that Connecticut had close to 25,000 outages. There would be more, especially since Bristol would be getting as much at 5 inches of rain and winds around 35 m.p.h. during the rest of the day. 

We won’t know much more until Monday.  

Aside from that the knee is healing, slowly and steadily. I am gearing up for school. Teachers where I teach in Rocky Hill are back Aug. 30. (In Bristol, they are back sooner.)  

Here at TBE, we continue to make progress with our online community journalism project. We will have some information for our readers soon. In the meantime, please send any suggestions for us to consider as we go forward. Send them to editor@bristoledition.org. Or to any of our staff. We love to hear from you. 

For this week’s reading/listening assignment, try this: Should we worry as billionaires buy up newspapers? on the New York Times Sway with Kara Swisher podcast. 

We’ll see what next week brings. 

Be well. 

“Come Sunday morning” is intended to be a weekly review, a recounting of the past week and an anticipation of week to come. Among its features will be reviews of old and new books, sharing of favorite podcasts, some family news, Bristol events and happenings and issues surrounding education, work and community journalism. He can be reached at dfortier@bristoledition.org.