It is official. Our grandson’s first day of Kindergarten has been delayed. From my point of view, school starts early in South Carolina. The schedule had been for a “meet and greet” with teachers and a look at the classroom tomorrow and the first day of school on Friday to give kids a weekend to adjust before going into the full week-long schedule next Monday. However, the new schedule is for the first full day of school to be Monday with an opportunity for parents to see the classrooms and meet the teachers after school. Our daughter isn’t happy. As a former preschool educator, she would be more comfortable to know exactly which classroom her son will be in. Sometimes, however, you have to make adjustments. No one can control the weather.

They are going to see some weather where she lives. The rain is falling hard there right now and is predicted to increase. The forecast is for nearly 9 inches of rain today with more than five tomorrow, a couple more inches on Thursday and nearly an inch on Friday. That’s a lot of rain. Flooding is likely. It is a big storm.

I read an article on why tropical storms are arriving earlier, becoming bigger, and moving slower than ever before. I confess I didn’t understand all of the technical information in the article, but increasingly violent storms are part of global warming. Unlike some tropical storms and hurricanes, this one is moving only about 7 mph with the center of the storm remaining just off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina for a couple of days before making landfall and heading on towards North Carolina and Virginia.

A huge roaring storm that gathers water from the ocean and dumps it on land means that the danger from this storm will be less from high winds and more from heavy rainfall.

The storm has been named Debbie.

The practice of giving human names to storms became common during World War II. The use of aircraft for warfare demanded a rapid increase in the study of weather for strategic purposes. Meteorologists fell into the practice of giving storms names so that they could easily be distinguished from one another, especially tropical storms, which were a huge factor in the Pacific theatre of that war. Naming cyclones and hurricanes also helped with communications with the public. When multiple storms struck a region, naming them helped people keep from confusion and made it easier to track the progress of a storm across a region. After the war the practice continued with the selection of short, easily remembered names.

I confess that not all of the names are easy for me to remember, but Debbie falls into the nasty to remember category.

I don’t want to cast dispersions on another person and I fear that folks who knew me as a child will easily make a direct identification, something that I usually try to avoid, but Debbie wasn’t my favorite classmate when I was in elementary school. She lived at the end of our block and she and her big sister were a formidable team.

Her father owned and ran the soft ice cream stand that sat on a pad adjacent to our father’s farm supply store. The ice cream was good. The attitude of the owner’s daughters not so much so. Now I happen to have married the daughter of the owner and operator of a small town Dairy Queen store, so I doubt that the attitude of the daughters was caused by their father’s line of work. On the other hand my wife’s father sold the Dairy Queen and worked as a master electrician by the time I met him. And Debbie’s Dad became a banker in our town.

Girls tend to mature a bit more quickly than boys and I wasn’t one of the biggest or most quickly developing boys in our class. By fifth grade Debbie was huge compared to me. And she was not at all reluctant to look down her nose at me. At one time she tried to institute inspections of our fingernails for cleanliness. I don’t know what made her think that she had the authority for such a practice. I just know that my fingernails were constantly dirty. I liked digging in the dirt for worms and getting greasy at our father’s shop. I thought muddy boots were the mark of a man and didn’t mind that mine frequently smelled like a barnyard. I could see no reason to have one’s fingernails inspected and didn’t submit to inspections willingly. Debbie, however, had the strength and speed to catch me as I walked to school. She’d be lurking somewhere on the schoolyard and getting away from her wasn’t easy.

I doubt that the inspections lasted for more than a week, but they left a lasting impression. Tropical Storm Debbie promises to leave an impression too. At least five people have already been killed by the storm. According to PowerOutage.com, more than 150.000 homes and businesses are without power in Florida with another 36,000 in Georgia and South Carolina. The numbers without electricity in Georgia and South Carolina will increase as the storm’s fury continues through Thursday.

Sometimes it just makes sense to rearrange schedules in the face of a storm. The governors of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina all declared states of emergency.

Forecasters predict that this hurricane season, which continues through November, to be a busy one. Debbie is only the fourth named storm of the year in the Atlantic, but additional large and slow moving storms are likely to follow. As the world heats unevenly, winds circulate in the atmosphere and storms develop over the ocean and intensify before coming ashore.

We live 3,000 miles away on the opposite coast where tropical storms rarely have an impact on our weather. Frankly we could use a little rain with wildfires burning all across Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.

And I have made it into my seventies with little or no lasting damage from childhood trauma. Something tells me that our grandson will also get through Debbie in good shape. It may be that it is just one of the trials of childhood that build character.