Last week the sky did something I had not seen in fifteen years of running a little shop on the south side of Lafayette. The wind came across in one straight, screaming line — a derecho, the meteorologists kept calling it — on top of a week of flooding and at least three tornadoes strong enough to earn a rating. On June 18, Governor Mike Braun declared a state of disaster emergency for 63 Indiana counties, Tippecanoe among them. At the worst of it, something like 12,000 Hoosiers were sitting in the dark.

And then, as it always does here, the second storm arrived: the one made of chainsaws and casseroles.

We are very good at the after

I will not soon forget the sound of my neighbors' generators humming down the block, or the text thread that lit up with "who needs a freezer," "who has a spare cooler," "the Hendersons are on oxygen, somebody check on them." Churches threw open their doors. Strangers cleared strangers' driveways of limbs. If you ever doubt that Tippecanoe County is a community and not just a collection of addresses, spend the morning after a derecho here.

So this is not a complaint. It is a nudge. Because we are wonderful at the after, and we are not yet as serious about the before.

Being ready is a community project, not a prepper's hobby. It looks like a city that keeps its tree canopy trimmed back from the lines before the wind comes, not after. It looks like utilities and county officials being honest that storms like this one are not getting any rarer, and budgeting for a sturdier grid and for our low-lying neighborhoods accordingly. Planning for that future is not a political statement; it is ordinary maintenance, the same as patching a roof you know will see rain.

And on our own streets, it looks like the least technological thing imaginable: knowing, before the power goes out, which of your neighbors is elderly, or alone, or depends on a machine that needs electricity. Keep that short list in your head. It is the best emergency plan most of us will ever have.

Two practical notes to close. If your family took on real expenses from this storm, the state has opened its Disaster Relief Fund to these counties — apply; that is what it is there for. And once the paperwork is in, go knock on the door of the neighbor you worried about last week, while the worry is still fresh. The casseroles will keep. The being-ready is the part we have to practice.