safe in the harbor at last
The plane lurched and dropped before righting itself again. A few passengers giggled nervously. The man in front of me patted his son’s hand. “It’s just like a theme park, isn’t it?” he said unconvincingly. I gripped the arms of my seat, bracing myself against the continuous bumping and the moments of free fall, and thought about how much I’ve always hated rollercoasters.
The road was brown with pine needles as my father drove me home from the airport, littered with branches lying limp on the ground. The streets were dark; even the stoplights had lost power, and the only illumination beyond our headlights was the ghostly green light of transformers blowing in the city substations. Clouds whipped by the treetops, and my father claimed he could feel the wind jolting the car. It seemed solid enough to me, and I closed my eyes against the lingering motion sickness and thanked God I was on the ground again.
We lugged my suitcases into the house in total darkness and tromped downstairs, where my grandparents held court by candlelight. They traded stories with my father: a douglas fir had fallen on a schoolbus, an alder fallen next to a baby’s crib in a house in Edmonds (the baby, unharmed, hadn’t even worken up), half the shingles of our neighbor’s decaying roof had disappeared, and the full storm wasn’t even due to hit in full for another few hours.
“Technically, it’s not a hurricane,” my father said, quoting an article in the paper that morning. “A hurricane has a warm center, and this one is cold.”
We considered this. “Huh,” said my grandmother.
“Let’s eat the ice cream,” said my grandfather.
Later, as I climbed up to my room carrying a candle whilst trying not trip and set the house on fire, my father called up the stairs, “Good to have you home. Is it nicer than Minnesota?”
“What, the weather?” I paused, then gave an answer that I had never expected to give. “Well, no. But it’s certainly more interesting.”
The road was brown with pine needles as my father drove me home from the airport, littered with branches lying limp on the ground. The streets were dark; even the stoplights had lost power, and the only illumination beyond our headlights was the ghostly green light of transformers blowing in the city substations. Clouds whipped by the treetops, and my father claimed he could feel the wind jolting the car. It seemed solid enough to me, and I closed my eyes against the lingering motion sickness and thanked God I was on the ground again.
We lugged my suitcases into the house in total darkness and tromped downstairs, where my grandparents held court by candlelight. They traded stories with my father: a douglas fir had fallen on a schoolbus, an alder fallen next to a baby’s crib in a house in Edmonds (the baby, unharmed, hadn’t even worken up), half the shingles of our neighbor’s decaying roof had disappeared, and the full storm wasn’t even due to hit in full for another few hours.
“Technically, it’s not a hurricane,” my father said, quoting an article in the paper that morning. “A hurricane has a warm center, and this one is cold.”
We considered this. “Huh,” said my grandmother.
“Let’s eat the ice cream,” said my grandfather.
Later, as I climbed up to my room carrying a candle whilst trying not trip and set the house on fire, my father called up the stairs, “Good to have you home. Is it nicer than Minnesota?”
“What, the weather?” I paused, then gave an answer that I had never expected to give. “Well, no. But it’s certainly more interesting.”