Last Updated on May 30, 2026 by admin
Eugenia Varela timed her family.
It was 4:08 p.m. on Friday — two days before the start of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season — and she was standing in the parking garage under her apartment building in Tampa, Florida, with a stopwatch on her phone and an extremely confused Cornish Rex named Knot in her arms.
Knot is five. He is bony, athletic, large-eared, and named for the knotted-rope toy he has been carrying in his mouth since he was six weeks old. The toy is on the kitchen counter right now. It will go in the carrier with him if a storm comes. Eugenia checked.
Eugenia’s husband Manuel is forty-one. Their twins, Sebastián and Soledad, are nine. The four of them, plus Knot, ran the drill three times on Friday afternoon, starting from the couch.
Drill one: four minutes, fifty-two seconds.
Drill two: four minutes, twenty-six seconds.
Drill three — with Knot already in the carrier from drill two, which Eugenia conceded was cheating — four minutes, twelve seconds.
The carrier label, printed on a small red luggage tag that Eugenia laminated at the FedEx Office on Bayshore last weekend, reads:
KNOT / VARELA
Apt 4B, Marina del Sol Tower
813-555-0926 (Eugenia) / 813-555-0941 (Manuel)
Vet: Bayshore Animal Clinic, 813-555-0218
Daily: 1 tsp pumpkin AM, raw beef PM
NOT food-aggressive. Loves shoulder. Hates car.
The carrier itself is a Sleepypod, hard-sided, with three working clips and a working safety latch. It lives by the front door from June 1 through November 30 every year. The other six months it lives in the hall closet, on the second shelf, where Eugenia can see it from the front door without opening anything.
Eugenia learned this — the carrier by the door from June to November, the laminated tag, the timed drill — from her mother, who learned it from her grandmother, who lost a cat named Higo during Hurricane Andrew in 1992, who told the story for the rest of her life, and who made sure her granddaughter heard it.
“Mami used to say it like this,” Eugenia said, sitting on the bumper of the family Subaru with Knot in the carrier and the twins arguing about who got to hold the binder. “You don’t lose a cat in a storm because you forgot to love him. You lose him because you didn’t make a plan.”
NOAA’s outlook for the 2026 Atlantic season calls for fourteen to twenty-one named storms. June first is Sunday.
The plan, in Eugenia’s apartment, fits on a single laminated tag.
Carrier by the door. Phone number that still rings. A photo on your phone from the last month. A family member outside the evacuation zone who knows the cat is coming if it has to. A vet’s number that picks up.
And — once a year, in the last week of May — a Friday afternoon where you set a stopwatch and find out, before a storm tells you, how long it takes to get the people and the small warm animal out of the apartment and into the car.
The Varela family’s time, this year, is four minutes and twelve seconds.
Knot has the knotted rope. He is, for the record, extremely angry about all of this.
He is also, for the record, completely safe. 🐾