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I didn’t know I was about to die, of course, but even so my last day held a strange undercurrent that began with first light. The air smelled familiar, although I couldn’t place the scent. I was sitting in the rocker, holding my sleeping baby, as the sun rose with an ominous hue. I wondered if a neighboring farm was on fire, but I smelled no smoke and I’d heard no warning bells or cries for help.
   My husband walked past us, displeased with me, as usual, because he thought my answering our daughter’s cries in the night would spoil her. But his coldness toward her made me want to comfort her more. If I could have climbed in her cradle, I would’ve made it my nightly refuge--we were each other’s favorite and only companions.
   On my last day, I knew something was not right. Something was approaching—either dangerous, like a storm, or wonderful, like a gift by post. Or better, a sea voyage, an adventure to rival the novels I read again and again. The excitement that was hiding behind the foreboding sunrise, the possibility of a marvelous change, some new opportunity, was the only reason I agreed when my husband said he would be away from home all day. We didn’t need protecting, so I thought. 
   As I baked the morning biscuits the screen door creaked but did not open, dust devils danced at the foot of the porch, and the light became more and more queer. The air was thick and yellowed. As my husband walked out of the house, I looked out through the lace curtains to catch the last glimpse of him. He took our mare, but not the wagon. I saw his broad back in a white shirt, his hair blowing as he rode bareheaded through our gate and away.
   It wasn’t until that moment, when at the same time the weather vane above us squealed to change position, that I recognized the smell of that morning: It was the scent of a mountain of unshed rain. So it was a storm that was coming after all. Uncommonly big, perhaps, but just rain. No impending miracle on the horizon. I felt deflated. A bad rain would mean lots of work cleaning up afterwards. But I tried to cheer myself--my husband was gone for the day and that freedom always lightened my heart. We had the house to ourselves.
   The weather continued to vex us with peculiar scents, vibrations, and utterances. The windows rattled as if some invisible hand played them with a fiddle bow. On the bulging black horizon, flashes bounced like fireflies in the dark cupped hands of the sky.
   I took out a bowl and pan, but before I had even scooped out the flour for the cookie dough, the wind that leaked through the window pane seams blew a puff of white powder off the top of the sack like a tiny specter. I lifted my child out of the wooden high chair and left the kitchen. As I passed through the dining room, the lace cloth on the table rippled by some mysterious draft.
   I headed upstairs with the idea that I would sit in bed with the baby in my lap and the blankets over our heads, but was stopped by a crash, then the sound of breaking glass. A gust of cold air swept over us--a second floor window must have broken. A branch from our Oak tree had probably smashed into one of the bedroom casements. My daughter whimpered and clung to me mightily. I stopped with my feet on two different steps.
   I returned to the lower of the steps--should I go up and try to save certain treasures from the rain? The two nice pictures we had in frames on the dresser--a portrait of my parents and a tintype of my husband as a boy? My grandmother’s Christening gown, folded in paper and sprinkled with dried lavender in the cedar chest should be safe. But my books--I should hurry and save them.
   Or should I run downstairs with my girl and close us into the cellar?
   If the winds became a tornado, that would be the safest place to hide. The whole house could rip out at the foundations and the cellar would still be there, the two of us dug down in the bottom corner.
   Everything in the dining room trembled as we passed through again. Shadow and light mixed in a frightening dance on the other side of the lace curtains. The winds began to take on a human sound, a moan under the hiss and growl of air. I opened the back door and the handle jerked out of my grip, the door slamming into the outside wall. The sky was full of top soil and leaves, twigs, even a gardening glove with fingers flapping.
   I didn’t know I had only a handful of minutes. Or that the cellar was a mistake. That strange feeling in my gut, that something wonderful might be just around the corner, flared back up inside me as we stepped out the kitchen door and into the wind. A thrill shot through me. God made the storm just as God made the rainbow and the calm that comes after the storm. God made the earth and all that dwelled there and also Heaven and Hell and all the angels and devils that dwell there, too. So there is God in everything, in the wind and the rain and the burning white of lightning.
   Maybe if I could have held onto that thought, I might have left that cellar for Heaven instead of hell. But then, I never would have found James. So maybe God truly was in the rising water and the darkness and the terror. His eye, the unblinking funnel of cloud at the center of my panic.