Well that was quite a weekend. A tornado
touched down in the Ottawa area Friday night and some people suffered a great
deal of damage to their homes and property. Although we in North Grenville were
virtually unharmed by the storm, we did notice a change in our little town.
Saturday morning, thousands of our neighbours to the north woke up to realize
their electricity had not come on over night. Worse than that, they were told
that the power might be out for five days. The stores, restaurants and gas
stations in the remaining powered areas of the city just couldn’t accommodate
the customers, so residents of the blacked-out areas headed south, to
Kemptville.
I was doing my regular Saturday grocery run
when I noticed the lineup from the MacEwen gas station. It was spreading all
the way back, out of the parking lot and down the road, into the roundabout.
There were about fifty cars lined up when I drove by. At first I thought, Wow. The price of gas at 1.18 must be really
good in Kemptville. Then I realized what was going on. Storm refugees.
There was an actual traffic jam in the
Canadian Tire parking lot, and the grocery stores were experiencing the same
influx of people who had come-from-away. I had a couple of my own storm
refugees – my daughter and her fiancé from Barrhaven, who needed to take a
shower, get a good night’s sleep and use our Internet for the night before they
hoped to return home.
As power lines were down on a section of
Greenbank Road and traffic was nuts, it took our Barrhavenites almost two hours
to get here. Once in town, they realized they were starving and pulled into Fat
Les’ chip stand for a poutine. It turned out to be a wise decision, because
nearly every other restaurant in town was full to the rafters with a line of
hungry, rumpled and tired people waiting to be seated.
I didn’t hang around long enough to witness
any grumpiness myself, but I hear that some people were less than patient when
dealing with the traffic and congestion in the stores. I’m going to give them
the benefit of the doubt and assume that, like me, they did not immediately
realize why they were forced to deal with a sudden influx of shoppers in our
little community. For the most part, I think we can safely say, residents of
North Grenville quickly realized that the newcomers to town were here because
they were hungry and in need of supplies. They didn’t need anyone giving them a
hard time. That’s not what my hometown is about.
Here is something I found on Facebook
Sunday night that warms my heart. It was written by Kika Smith, who runs one of
our local coffee shops. Located on the County Road 43 strip, Brewed Awakenings
would have been directly in the line of fire for all of those disheveled
visitors in desperate need of a good cup of java:
What a weekend! It has been an incredibly busy
weekend with many new faces coming in from areas affected by the tornadoes. I
want to take a minute to thank my phenomenal staff, who took it all in stride
and continued to smile and put orders out quickly. One of my staff was headed
to volleyball tryouts, which got cancelled, and when she saw how busy we were,
she came in and worked for six hours. Not only that, but her dad came in and
did dishes for us for hours, smiling and joking the whole time. Thank you
Rachel, Rick and Debbie at Grahame's Bakery, who were ridiculously busy at
their place but took a couple minutes to drop off some extra bread; not because
we asked them to but because they knew that we would be as busy as they were
and need the extra bread. Thank you to Paula who stopped in for a coffee and
cleared tables while she waited. Thank you Cathy, who offered to run out and
get us any groceries that we may need. Thank you Ghislaine, one of our regular
customers who offered to do dishes when she saw our absolutely full restaurant;
she decided to come back when it was less busy to get her espresso and then
helped us clean up at the end of the day. Again, a huge shout out to my staff
for being so amazing. And lastly, thank you to all our customers, new and
regular alike, for their patience and humour. We live in an incredible
community.
Indeed, we do.
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