Snow storms are around the corner. Although Floyd didn’t hit, it gave us a great opportunity to practice crossing the impending-storm crazy line.

First, there’s our D-cell battery hysteria. I bought 16, two days before Floyd’s no-show.

“We have two flashlights,” Bob said.

“You’ll thank me tomorrow when nobody can get any.”

“But we don’t need that many.”

“Everybody wants something they can’t have. What if I told you that in four hours you couldn’t get any pizza?”

That worked. We loaded up on Ds.

The Oscar in the fruitcake category goes to giddy weather forecasters. I saw one on TV, demonstrating high winds by standing in a wind tunnel. His feet were strapped to the floor and his arms were stretched out to the side, grasping reins so he wouldn’t blow over. He lost his hat in 20 mph wind. By 70 mph, his neck skin was flapping. And by 80 mph, his whole face was fluttering.

But the thing is - he was smiling.

And then there are the nutso “tough it out” guys. Talk about men from Mars. I think the planet Machismo Nincompoopus is more fitting. I watched an interview. “Yep, we stuck it out for Hurricane Bob and all we lost was our car and our house.”

We also have the hardy campers asked to evacuate their campsites on the canal. “Hey, those rangers don’t know anything. They told us to move for the last one, and when we drove our camper to higher ground, it got walloped by a tree. I’m staying here - right in the hurricane’s path. That’s the safest place to be, and you can quote me.”

I swear I’ve seen this same man at Jack’s Lounge, having a “smash the ash tray on your knuckles” contest to see who wouldn’t flinch.

The scuttlebutt before a storm reminds me of the children’s game “telephone”. With Floyd, it started with the real thing. “Hurricane Warning for Cape Cod.”

I bought ice. “Are they closing the bridges?” the checker asked. The woman behind me turned and said to the next in line, “They’re closing the bridges! And we’ll probably lose power!” That person turned to the next shopper. “ComElectric’s cutting power to the Cape!” And so on.

Later on TV, I saw a newscaster standing on a Falmouth beach. Behind him was a jet-skier (another group I’m in love with) riding the surf perilously close to the pier. “Look at that lunatic racing through the waves,” I said to Bob, who was smiling. “What is this? When the barometer falls, testosterone levels rise?”

Although the current was swift, the land scene was calm. The newscaster looked around nervously. “The winds  . . .  the winds  . . .  .” A family was picnicking beside him.

And so, we never lost power. But we turned out all the lights anyway and lit an old brass oil lamp. Then, we snuggled together and did what people in love do.

We played a battery operated Trivial Pursuit game which, by the way, takes 2 Ds.

The sound of the wind kept me up, afraid, most of the night. I thought about when I was little. I was always too scared to fall asleep when we lost power, so my neighbor Jamie got to sleep over. She and I slept together, wriggling under the quilt to the foot of the bed. There, we shined flashlights under our chins, made goofy faces and laughed our fright away.

Even though we didn’t lose electricity, this old fear washed over me. (Maybe our individual storm craziness has roots in our memories and is not so inexplicable after all.) So as not to wake Bob, I pulled the sheet over my head, turned on the flashlight and began to fall asleep.

I wondered if Jamie was doing the same.