she would have been scared

Everyone's talking about the coming storm--Frankenstorm.  Torrential rain, power losses, howling winds.  It's like she knew it was coming, and knew she wouldn't make it through.  She developed a fear of lightning and thunder as she got older, and then eventually even the sound of rain spooked her.  It would be the middle of the night, and we would hear a loud scratch on the bedroom door.  Not the small, continuous scratches the cat makes, but one long claw scrape.  I would let her in, and she would jump on the bed and stay with me until the danger passed.  It was the only time she ever slept in our bed--when she was afraid.  When she became ill and couldn't get up, I worried about how she would let us know she was scared, if she couldn't climb the stairs.  Sometimes she couldn't be consoled even when she came upstairs, so my husband would go down and stay with her on the first floor, where she normally slept.

One time when we lost power, I had been using my George Foreman grill, and the grill beeped just before the power went out.  Raven became scared of power outages--maybe because they were generally accompanied by wind and rain--and as a result became afraid of electronic beeps.  She associated the beep with bad things--wind and rain and noise and darkness.  So every time I used a cooking device that beeped, I had to reassure her that everything was OK.  I wish I could reassure her now.