Another Season

 The rain came earlier than prior seasons. The rain that year appeared to be harder than before.

Calling the storms, rain didn’t describe the storms anymore. The water fell in sheets that pounded the roofs until they buckled and carried off whole neighborhoods into the swollen Otonabee river. 

That evening Anna pressed her forehead against the window, watching the streets vanish beneath brown waves. Only the tips of streetlamps marked where roads had once been.

She remembered when spring used to mean planting season and flowers. Now it meant alerts and emergencies.

All of a sudden, her father said: “Pack what you can,” his voice was calm and yet firm. It was the tone he always used in emergencies, as though his steadiness could hold back the flood. But Anna could see the fear on his face. Her father was aware she knew they were running out of places to go.

The family had fled three times in the last few years. Each time they fled they were searching for higher ground, safer ground. But since the damage to the environment became evident the storms were stronger, longer and they always found where they were. 

The map showed some regions that could be stable for another few years, but the maps were out of date. Since the solar storm of 2025 destroyed the GPS satellites, paper maps, out-of-date as they were, had become popular once again. The other sources of information were as unreliable as the lack of GPS. The public, or maybe the world, simply refused to wait for predictions that in some cases came from historical patrons that had been forever altered in the last twenty years or came from predictions based on faith, beliefs, superstition, or pseudoscience. Without the satellites that once predicted the weather there was no reliable information. 

The pacing of their lives had become always running, never rebuilding. It appears that there was no future or capacity to plan for the future anymore, only reaction.

When the house groaned and shifted, Anna’s little brother clung to her arm. He was too young to remember what the world had been like before. He only knew the endless dry summers of extreme heat that scorched almost everything, with wildfire destroying the few forests still existing. The long and stormy springs and autumns and almost no winter. He never saw the lakes with water clear enough to swim in. Summers that were not scorching hot, swimming in the lake, and singing songs beside the open fire eating smores. 

He only knew disaster as the rhythm of his childhood: fire seasons, hurricane seasons, flood seasons. He has become an expert at packing his backpack to leave at a moment’s notice. 

Anna carried the memories like a burden. They made her both strong and broken. 

“Will it stop?” her brother whispered, eyes wide. She didn’t answer. When she had asked the same question when she was his age, no one answered her either.

That night, the family abandoned the house. The current pulled at their legs as they waded through the streets. Anna turned once, saw the roof of her school slide beneath the flood, the letters of its name dissolving into the water. Something inside her dissolved, too.

They found shelter in a crowded gymnasium high on a hill. Families huddled together, eyes hollow, clinging not to belongings but to each other. The mood inside was brittle, anxious laughter, whispered prayers, sudden bursts of grief.

Anna lay awake listening to the storm hammering the windows, and in the spaces between thunder, she felt something worse: the certainty that this wasn’t the end. There would be another flood, another fire season, another season of running.

Her father sat beside her, staring at nothing. He finally spoke; his voice was hoarse. “I used to think we had found a safe place. But maybe there isn’t one anymore.”

Anna reached for her brother’s hand, squeezed it tight. She realized then that survival meant: not escaping the storms but enduring them together. Their story was not about saving the world. Their story was about not letting the world take away their humanity as the last storm had taken their mother and older brother. 

As she sat down, she came to the realization that they were not going to leave again. The family would, for the first time in her life, stay and rebuild their house on the hill. It meant rebuilding their life as well. Somehow somewhere in her mind there was peace within the storm. 

For the first time Anna allowed herself to let the sound of the rain rock her to sleep. 

They were not going anywhere.

The rain kept falling.