Whenever a Nor’easter blows in from the sea, it grabs the curved railings of our terrace and shakes them. They vibrate with a strange low music and the dark harp plays all night, all day until the wind shifts and we can hear the ocean again. But this was more. This time there was no reprieve, for it was a slow moving, long-lasting major storm, one important enough to have a name.

Pain is always worse at night and I lay there in the dark with a throbbing infected tooth that matched the vibrating air as though I had internalized the pressure surrounding us. We were lashed and drowning, trapped inside. The air was warm without thunder or lightning. The National Weather Service kept issuing tornado warnings:

“If no shelter is available, lie flat in the nearest ditch and cover your head with your hands.”

“Turn around, don’t drown,” said our Senator. Everything was sunken underfoot, damp critters gone to ground. The rain seeped through the sliding doors—small wet volcanoes and gushers shot from the weep holes and the slow seeping stained the floorboards. The weather folk, in their disaster mode, suited up in rain gear near beaches, wobbled by 70 mph winds, were measuring inches of rain.

On the first night, already wearing my sleep mask, I went for the earplugs in the white plastic box with hieroglyphics on the front. I lay there in the trembling of the railings and wondered how we came to this troubled shuddering music on this island, but I knew and I lay there and blamed myself that we had not left at the first warnings. The palm fronds rattled and bent back towards the torn up tennis courts of the hotel. The ocean, almost invisible, whipped itself white and the railings sang their loud lament. I headed for the back bedroom where a slit of air blew a paper tornado through the room.

This was a state of emergency. “This is three hurricanes’ worth of rain,” as a local man said. The television loved this storm, which, large and slow, hung over the state eight days with a record four landfalls.

We were trapped, but not helpless. The electricity stayed on and our neighbors Professor Toby and Maia stayed on, too. I sent over towels to stuff in the leaks. We had food and drink and extra towels. We were warm and rather cozy with some of the old comforts of my childhood rainy days sitting in a window seat with a book or just staring out.

The lassitude of the August heat was replaced by the lassitude of imprisonment with nothing to do but read or watch the rain spasms on the windowsills or the weather map where pulsating blobs of green (rain), yellow (intenser), red (most intense), shy as a beach critter, approached, retreated, approached again. My heart went out to all the fools in the storm, to those who felt it might be a good time for a swim in the huge raging ocean (they drowned) or to go kite surfing (the wind slammed a young man into a restaurant in Ft. Lauderdale).

I decided to go out onto the terrace. I stepped out and the wind seized my foot. I battled to keep it attached to my leg and my leg as part of my body since Tropical Storm Fay obviously wanted to pull me across the terrace and over the trembling railings blown out to sea…

Finally, there was silence—after three days of sobbing, whistling and moaning wind and lashings of rain bands—it was quiet. The glass on the sliders no longer strained to burst or vibrated when I held my palm against it. The sea still rose up high and white, but children played by the water’s edge, rode their skim boards on drowned lawns, and the sun came up hard and bright. A man came to remove the sunken deck chairs from inside the pool and vacuum up fronds and bark that had blown into the water.

Everything had a sheen and droplets hung from the swollen plants.

I fished the sodden towels that had absorbed the window and slider leaks from the washer and hefted them into the dryer.

That night, the howling resumed and the air began to cry again. The red band warnings resumed their crawl across the bottom of the TV. The snapping, rattling buzz that bent the palms to silver told me that the tropical storm was not quite finished with us.

I remembered the snow storm of years ago when we drove down the coast from New York and lay trapped in the motel in Rocky Mount. Outside was hard packed snow and ice that we slipped on. Outside the air had cracked our windshield. Still we could walk through it. I lay there, sick and bewildered, and downstairs in the lobby the old people waited and ate sweet things.

And now I see that first storm had blown me into exactly where I belonged with the snowbirds. I, too, was a person who could not quite leave home, who had to keep going back, a person who held on to, who somehow could not sell the old place, where family and former friends were waiting, that cold place where the memories began, where the work had been, that place of the young gone life of the past.

As the snowbirds perched there, puffed and dripping, melting, piping warnings about the roads to each other I wished them: Fly safe. Return safe to the warm place and then fly back home. I am with you now.

Both storms meant power outages, wrecks on the road, sudden deaths. Somewhere in between the two upheavals I located this liminal new life. It had taken a gathering of forces–one to propel us here and one to fold us in like a tornado taking things up and spinning them inward. This storm named Fay might be some sort of an end.

In fact, my life was bracketed by warnings. I never went to a public school, but in those schools, a bit before my time, they warned the children to duck and cover. We had ducked away from New York and covered ourselves in obscurity to be safe. And now, weather/nature, the one thing that had not bothered us much in New York, had come here to intrude and keep us prisoner. We saw how much we were weather-dependent here where the weather is your mood.

“My life has become about the little things,” said the actress Anita Pallenberg when she was my age. “It was about the big things at first and now it is about the little things.”

In our home, I had built a simple place in a corner apartment on the shore. We enjoyed it, cared for it, kept it clean and swept of sand.

I did not have to know the whole island, go out on the cold night waters in a shrimp boat or know the names of every flower and bird. I could accept as Kimie did and let the other side of the island be the other side and not go to look.

I had become a creature almost unrecognizable to my previous self. I lived by the tides. I swam with the moon and the sun and the glittering fish and, when the sun was right, I trailed my shadow across the pool. I walked barefoot past the cactus and the doves in the dunes. I smelled honeysuckle in the fresh morning air. Edward was ever there in the next room, a loving presence, faithful, dear, and very familiar.

Sometimes when I woke in the middle of the night I lay still on my back in the cleft of my covers and listened to the sea. The sliding door was open and I would try to match my breathing to the waves. My hair was thick with the day’s swim and, were I to lick my own bare shoulder, I would taste the ocean’s salt. It was then I would think of what I had become, a changed being at one with this place as the unending waves called me back to sleep. We were living a dream, after all, and all dreams end—the sleeper sitting up, wild–haired, rubbing the eyes. Where did that come from? What was I thinking? And then he wakes.