Staying.

Today, we made the decision that we’re staying. This morning Irma had weakened slightly and shifted slightly, and it seemed like the right call. So to celebrate this staying, we went downtown, to this new place where we are. To see it, to learn its corners and its sunlit paths. This new place we never thought we would be, this place we never knew existed before we got the call.

Mirror Lake reminded me not of Florida, not of what I’ve seen of the south, but a little of Europe, where we went before Lincoln was born, with high arches and stone railings, with slate pathways and calm gardens. There is a lot here this week that feels not quite right, arches in rural Florida, hurricanes churning up dry land, but it all ties up into being exactly right after all, tying up loose ends in previous lives.

These misplaced arches, from Rome maybe, or from Budapest, but instead in this small town in the middle of a swamp, almost like this improper hurricane, which has posed a threat we never thought we’d see here, not in the middle of Florida, both east and west and north and south. A central place where no hurricane except the strongest one in the Atlantic could reach, and now it’s here, it’s coming, it has formed and is on its way.

We stay. Because we know these storms, these big ones, from Okinawa. We know how they can shake houses and fell trees; we know their deep roaring and their howling. But we also know they don’t stay strong over land for long, they weaken when they lose their power source, that water and that moving air over the vast oceans.

We also know a Category 3 was not enough to rip away our favorite ramen shack restaurant in Japan, which was built with nothing but metal siding and a prayer. And our house, we’ve found out, was built by its own misplaced Scandinavian who moved from Arctic regions and thought the houses here needed two inch walls with insulation in between, and heavy marble window sills holding them all down.

We know that people like to say storms will stay category 4 on land, but they rarely ever do.

So we’ve come to Lakeland and we’ll stay, because we know this place and its shadows and small copies of a different continent, of a different life. We understand this facsimile of Europe’s arches that we can now share with our boys, as they run around the lake and laugh at all the birds, as they walk off the paths in gardens when we are not looking, just to see the little fountains.

Familiar fountains and the familiar sound of angry winds.

Tonight, Irma strengthened again, and the path shifted to right over us, but now the roads are headlight to headlight and there is no gas, and here, this place, seems better than the side of the road, or on it, while a hurricane chases us from behind and passes over. Our car does weigh less than the ramen shack, after all, but this place, this Scandinavian house in Florida, with its marble and it’s plaster, seemed more solid than almost anywhere else we could go, since the storm is wider than the whole peninsula and headed north.

We will gather our important papers in one place and put the food in the hallway and the bathroom, and fill the tub with water. We will move beds away from windows and find the extra flashlight batteries.

I’m all for new places and new adventures. But maybe sometimes wisdom is knowing when the greatest danger is in the unknown, like crowded highways and uncertain gas stations and whether there will be water, and being chased up a peninsula by a storm that is bigger than the land.

But here? We know this place. We know these times. We’ve done it all before.