Our friends brought walleye over on Sunday afternoon. Husband dredged their catch in his homemade batter and plunged the pieces into the hot oil in the fryer by our backyard gate. The skies glowered and darkened, setting the timer on our outdoor cooking. He dunked more filets into the vat, turning them into crispy goodness, extracted them with tongs, and laid them to rest on a paper towel-lined dish. The atmosphere rumbled, and each passing minute warned us: Your time is short. Get in the house now or else.
My man cooked more pieces, dropping them in and pulling them out of the oil. If he heard nature’s not-so-distant timpani, his face didn’t show it.
The visiting kids climbed out of the pool, wrapped towels around their middles, and gazed at the sky, their smiles sliding away. Their mom and I scooped up the glasses, phones, and bags by the pool chairs and quickened our steps into the house, the drops chasing us. Soon, the men followed with their platter of gold.
We served up the fish, salad, and chips indoors, the flashing firmament our backdrop, and soon our meal went dark. Flicka and Snipp gathered candles from around the house, putting their leftover wedding tapers to good use in candelabras. Fully lit, our place looked more like the staging of a murder mystery dinner than a Sunday evening picnic on paper plates.
Husband and I crawled into bed after the visit, our stomachs and hearts full and the power still out. Lightning and rain thrashed the atmosphere beyond our windows, but silence hovered inside our room. No electrical noise of any kind hummed to jar our sleep.
Babies and aging had stolen my talent in sleeping well, but on Sunday night, I sank into serenity, blankets of peace swaddling me in the deepest rest I’ve known in years.
At four in the morning, though, the house snapped back to life. All the lights flicked on—I wished we had turned the switches off before retiring—and the buzzing, thrumming, and whirring of our modern home resumed.
I flew from bed, heart hammering, and turned off all the lights. The healing quietness had vanished.
I started my Monday, marveling at the blissful darkness that had enshrouded me much of the night, and the power flipped off again, this time interrupting work from my home office. It clicked back on minutes later, but the internet connection stayed away for hours, and we weren’t the only ones. Thousands in our community were still without power, the internet, and all the extras that add noise to our lives.
Tuesday seemed normal enough, if a person considers news of an 8.8 magnitude earthquake striking near Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, triggering tsunami warnings across the Pacific, including Japan, the United States’ west coast, and our girl’s new residence in Hawaii normal.
Dicka’s messages from Kona popped onto our screens.
Another tsunami warning. This time an alert on our phones like an Amber alert. She sent us a screenshot of the National Weather Service’s message. Certain sentences stood out: You are in danger. Get away from coastal waters. Move to high ground or inland now.
Five words from my morning reading hit me—Listen to me, O coastlands—along with the smallness of our humanity, the helplessness of our position in the world, and our wait for nature to overtake us.
But likely destruction had dissipated before, and it could happen again. You will do greater things than these…
It couldn’t hurt to ask.
Calmer of wind and waves, calm these—and me.
Thousands of miles away, sirens blared, and Dicka was moved from her YWAM base to its upper campus for the night. She kept us posted about the timing of when the waves would hit. It would be 7:00 p.m., their time, she said. Midnight for us in Minnesota. The previous night’s restful sleep was nowhere on earth. I kept my phone on, my attention lasered in on new messages.
By 4:00 a.m., Central Standard Time, the storm was downgraded to a tsunami advisory. Later, our girl texted us a morning selfie from a different bed somewhere on higher ground. She held up peace fingers.
Idk if anything happened after I went to bed, but nothing happened at 7 p.m. when they said the first wave would hit
Amen and so be it.
And so, it was.
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*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka and their husbands, Snipp, Snapp, and Snurr.