Rain has been pouring here for two or three hours, our first rain this week. Maybe the downpour started earlier, but I was pretending to sleep then.

Wake, hear the drops earnest on the shingles, wonder about my sandals or what else beneath the house (open among its pilings for hurricane visits), give those feelings over to the beach, and return to sleeping, my pillowcase over a stranger's brand-name pillow.

But the sun has a chance today. The sky is a clear yellow just above the horizon and just blue above the cloud line, up 45 or 60 degrees. Even as I write, this roof quiets. Stumbling, I cover my head and the camera with yesterday's paper to take a picture from the porch. In all: Beach, sea, the yellow, clouds, the blue, collectively nowhere in proportion with this page.

The rest of the house wakes. My mom notices the blue over the ocean, but my dad says the storm is coming from the west, still coming to the ocean. My mom grows concerned with an open window in a room we haven't used and is barely a room at all, just walls and felt over a deck. She opens the room and goes for paper towels, and I curse invisible mosquitoes flying in.

But I was lost before this minute. I just hid it better from my heartbeat and blood pressures. Otherwise, I wouldn't have woken so early and sought something beyond rest.

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