Hello dear poets and welcome to Open Link Night! This is Gayle from Bodhirose’s Blog and I’ll be your host for the next couple of days.

It’s hard to believe that September is more than half way over and even here in Florida the extreme heat of summer is giving way to some more moderate temperatures. But something I experienced last week with our weather was not moderate at all.  Hurricane Irma paid Florida a visit!

In all my years of dealing with hurricanes, I’ve never evacuated one but this time my daughter made the executive decision for us to skedaddle. It was a category 5 and heading straight for Miami…or so it seemed…and the forecasting had it going pretty much all over the state. We decided to head north of Orlando and inland to one of our favorite small cities, Mount Dora. So off we went after my daughter found a charming 3-story Victorian bed and breakfast right across the street from Lake Dora. At the suggestion of the owner of the inn, we took the route of US 1 instead of getting on congested I-95 and made record time with ease. (My other daughter and her family went to stay with relatives at The Villages). To make a long story short, we stayed a couple of days and then as we watched the storm take a turn up the west coast of Florida and heard that it was due to come right over where we took sanctuary, we decided to head back home on the opposite coast the way we had come. We arrived home safely and our house was spared any damage but we did end up losing power for a few days…inconvenient yes, but it could have been worse. Many of our neighbors had power losses much longer than we did and suffered trees down, etc. I neither heard about nor saw any real structural damage to our small town. I think we dodged a bullet!

As most of you know, unless you’re a newcomer here, Open Link Night is when you choose any ONE poem of yours to share. There is no prompt and no specific instructions to follow. So enjoy your time here and pay your fellow pub goers a visit as everyone makes the rounds of reading and sharing.

Here is how you link your poem:

• • Write a poem on your blog.
  • Enter a link directly to your one poem and your name by clicking Mr Linky below.  There you will find links to other poets and more will join during the next 48 hours.
  • Read and comment on other poet’s work.  We all come here to have our poems read.
  • Please link back to dVerse from your site/blog.
  • Comment and participate in our discussion below, if you like. We are a friendly bunch of poets.
  • Enjoy!