Storm Surges

a writing prompt for you to use this week

As Hurricane Ian makes landfall in Florida—the state where I grew up, and where family still lives—I am watching the news with familiar anxiety. There were no snow days from school, but hurricane days happened almost every fall.

Pictures from past storms sometimes pop up on the digital photo frame I share with relatives: Debris in the yard. The river where it shouldn't be.

Other pictures from past storms live just in my memory: A kayaker in the street. My parent’s neighborhood on national news. A water spout heading for the house.

In over half a century of living with Florida weather, my family has been fortunate, over and over. The storm surge hit the tide just right and we stayed dry. The tree fell in the right direction. The path veered away, or the wind died down. Every lucky break for us meant the storm turned toward someone else.

We’ve had our share of other kinds of storms and trauma: accidents, disease, loss. Some of those storms were slow-moving disasters with time to gather supplies and support. Others barrelled in without warning and flooded everything. When they passed, we learned to regroup and rebuild.

Mary Oliver—who has a poem for everything—gives us words to keep hope alive, whatever kind of storm we’re facing.

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a poem

Hurricane
—by Mary Oliver

It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

—Mary Oliver,  A Thousand Mornings.

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a writing prompt

(I first typed “a waiting prompt” which is apropos for hurricanes. I’m waiting and praying for all in Ian’s path.)

Write about a storm, and its aftermath—one with wind and rain, or another kind.