Chris Abernathy, author of the Detective Whiskers Cat Cozy Mystery series, is visiting Ascroft, eh? today to tell us how a hurricane affected him and his family, and how it will affect his future writing.
Welcome, Chris. I’ll turn the floor over to you –
The Detective Whiskers Cozy Mystery Series is set in Paradise Cove, a fictional beach town on the Florida gulf coast. Although it’s not spelled out exactly in the series, in my mind the town is nestled somewhere in the Big Bend area where the panhandle meets the peninsula. That means that, if it really existed, Paradise Cove would currently be recovering from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Idalia.
It has been in my mind a lot since the hurricane struck, wondering what things might be like for Whiskers and Sheila, as well as the rest of the characters. I lived through a direct hit from a hurricane myself almost exactly three years ago now. Hurricane Sally hit Orange Beach just four days after we sold our house in northeast Alabama and moved down.
Sunset Cottage, Sheila and Whiskers’ home, would almost certainly have been flooded if not completely destroyed as it sits directly on the beach. Where would they be?
One of the things that we had to consider as we looked for a place to go was finding something pet friendly. Even though the options were extremely limited we knew that our Gracie couldn’t be passed off to another family or shelter while we adjusted. She had already endured massive upheaval in the move. The stress of the storm affected her as much as the rest of us so adding separation anxiety was out of the question.
I hope that Sheila and Whiskers would be able to stay together, also. The Parrot Eyes Inn is family friendly and, even if that hadn’t been the case, I’m certain that Evelyn would make an exception for her friend Sheila who has done so much to help her at the Inn. With the Inn’s location being a few blocks from the beach it may have survived, although, considering the disrepair it was already suffering from that seems a bit unlikely. In all probability, Sheila and Whiskers would have evacuated before the storm arrived and be left to scour television news coverage for any signs of how their home and their town fared.
In our case, we stayed put. The storm was expected to stay well to our west. By the time we realized it was coming straight for us the winds had reached dangerous enough levels that I made the decision to hunker down instead of crossing one of the three high bridges that provide access on and off the island. If I had listened to our son, who was celebrating his 14th birthday that day, we would have been safely away and staying in a hotel somewhere. Instead, we ate cake and pizza while the sky darkened and the wind howled.
The first sign that our house might not stand up to the storm was when we noticed water stains on the ceiling. With 110 mile-per-hour winds screaming outside the windows, I climbed into the attic looking for where the water was getting in. What I found was a gable that had been blown into the attic. That allowed the rain, which was more driving than falling, to sweep straight into the attic unobstructed. The ceiling was doomed and soon fell, literally, on our heads. Water reached every inch of the house, inside and outside of every wall. The house was doomed.
The next few weeks were spent hopping from one AirBNB to the next while shopping for a new house. Before the storm the market was extremely tight. Houses would pop up on the listings then disappear the same day. Following the storm many of the available houses for sell were now unavailable due to damage or changes in the sellers’ plans. Houses to rent were even harder to find. Eventually we found a house that wasn’t listed but our agent had seen it listed a few months prior and asked the owners if they would consider an offer. We offered their previous asking price that same day and worked out a deal to move in early and pay rent until the closing.
The whole experience changed my mindset in more ways than I can express here. I appreciate things more than I used to and take less for granted. Watching Idalia sweep onto Florida’s coast brought back the memories. I anticipated the experiences that the people living there would be facing. I thought about how their lives would change and how their communities would change.
There is so much left to be done before we know how, and if, these hard-hit communities will rebuild. Each individual family will have to decide for themselves if they want to start over where they have spent their lives or start a new chapter somewhere else. Some of them will have that decision made for them because circumstances outside of their control will determine if rebuilding is even possible.
How will this all affect Sheila and Whiskers? That chapter (or book) is yet to be written. But I will be watching what these communities do and pondering the possibility of including a hurricane in a future book. I like to keep my stories fun and funny so this would be a challenge. I just hope that I do’t get too much fresh inspiration!
Thank you for sharing this with us, Chris, and good luck with the Detective Whiskers Cat cozy mystery series.
Readers can learn more about Chris Abernathy by visiting the author’s website and his Facebook and Amazon pages. You can also sign up for his newsletter.
The book is available online at Amazon
About Chris Abernathy: Chris has narrated more than 200 audiobooks and now he is writing his own stories. He has been a storyteller his entire life — around campfires at a summer camp as a counselor, on the radio for more than 30 years, as an actor with background roles on major motion pictures and TV series, as a producer of short films for social media and more. Chris is married with two sons and lives on the Gulf Coast in Alabama. He is a dual national with citizenship in the US and UK and visits family in the Scottish Highlands as often as possible.
