Mrs. Thalia Ludlow was often closely observing the eight little Ludlows in her family, but it was easier than one would think if they were all in the house: they mirrored their (grand)father, Capt. R.E. Ludlow. Even ten-year-old Glendella, an adopted cousin and not a born grandchild to the Ludlow grandparents, had fallen into the pattern. Mrs. Ludlow was almost always calm; they were used to that and relied on it daily. But in a crisis, they looked to see what the old warrior was doing, and if he was calm, they completely chilled out.
“One cannot fight the arm of a hurricane,” he had said to his somewhat more frustrated granddaughter, eight-year-old Edwina. “Our arms are a bit too short.”
“But can we kick it out of the way?” Edwina said.
“No, but we can sit up here and look cozy under our blankets and drink hot chocolate – Grandma is making regular hot chocolate and I'm making hot-hot,” he said. “We do have a choice in whether to see this as positive, or not.”
“Well, yeah,” she said, “there are some silver linings to this, and I look real cute sipping on a mug and being unbothered, so, yeah.”
Capt. Ludlow had picked up the habit from his cousin, Col. H.F. Lee: he liked a little chili and cayenne pepper in his hot chocolate.
“And you gotta try it, Glennie!” five-year-old R.E. Ludlow III, also known as Lil' Robert, was saying as he brought his new cousin-sister int the kitchen. “There's enough, because, see, just because Ellie and George and Eddie and me like it doesn't mean there isn't enough!”
“OK, I'm up for it, Robert,” Glendella said, and eleven-year-old Eleanor and nine-year-old George and Edwina let her go first and watched.
“Yeah, this is good – thank you, Upgrade Papa!” she said. “You do need a little something extra for a hurricane.”
“I think so,” Capt. Ludlow said with a smile as he began filling Eleanor's mug.
When everyone had their chocolate, all the Ludlows went into the living room where they would wait out the tremendous rain together, and Mrs. Ludlow smiled as the little Ludlows arranged themselves between her and Capt. Ludlow. Six-year-old Grayson, being completely unflappable just like his grandfather, persisted with his latest blueprint project on the coffee table, because –.
“We're gonna need a lot of new buildings,” he said, and kept working with his white crayons and blue paper. “It's raining harder than when Justicia visited.”
He was right, possessing the uncanny sense of his great-grandfather Edwin Ludlow about such things. The Ludlow grandparents let him work on, and he kept on until he put down his crayon to think for a moment and fell asleep.
For Grayson's near-peers Lil' Robert and seven-year-old Amanda, having both Ludlow grandparents sitting down was a blessing – they did not understand the seriousness of the hurricane and so just wanted to maximize their snuggle time … and George, who did understand, also wanted the same thing, so they sat the closest to their grandparents and the rain put them to sleep soon enough. That left Edwina in her grandfather's big chair all wrapped up in a purple blanket and looking cute and unbothered until she went to sleep, and left Glendella, Eleanor, and ten-year-old Andrew to read, play Uno, and just observe the extraordinary weather incident they were living through. All of them documented it, with their thoughts about it, in their journals, before they also gave up and snuggled into each other and one or another pairs of their grandparents' legs and went to sleep.
Mrs. Ludlow knew they all would, because the captain, to whom heavy rain did not even register as a threat so long as his unit was shielded from it, had gone to sleep. Rarely did he have time to sit down for long in the middle of the day, and he and Mrs. Ludlow were almost always tired. Rain generally tended to relax him and put him to sleep, so he went off to dreamland almost as quickly as Lil' Robert and Amanda.
That left Mrs. Ludlow, who took the next six hours to catch up on some reading and writing before also engaging in the family pastime of getting some sleep.