Waiting for Irene on Saturday, 1PM

This morning you could feel her for the first time, the air thick, wet, gray and heavy. Gone was the surreal, disconnected feeling attending yesterday's balmy blue skies and glorious regiments of perfect white clouds. Hurricane? Yesterday calamity seemed impossible, although there was not a single parking spot to be had at Lowe's, and the checkout lines at the Pathmark supermarket snaked back into aisles denuded of pasta. The sheets of plywood screwed down tight over the doors and windows intensify the silence of the streets. It rains from time to time with quick, fierce downbursts that quickly fade into a drippy calm, as if we are already feeling a kind of cyclonic, circular churning of the oblong Irene, still 400 miles away. Down the block, I hear the whine of circular saws.