Florida

By Lauren Groff

The damage was done: three-hundred-year-old trees smashed, towns flattened as if a fist had come from the sun and twisted. My life was scattered into three counties. Someone found a novel with my bookplate in it sunning itself on top of a car in Georgia. Everywhere I looked, the dead. A neighbor child, come through the storm, had wandered outside while the rest of the family was salvaging what remained, and had fallen into the pool and drowned. The high school basketball team, ignoring all warnings, crossed a bridge and was swallowed up by the Gulf. Old friends were carried away on the floods; others, seeing the little that remained, let their hearts break. The storm had stolen the rest of the wine and the butler’s pantry, too. My chickens had drowned, blown apart, their feathers freckling the ground. For weeks, the stench of their rot would fill my dreams. Over the next month, mold would eat its way up the plaster and leave gorgeous abstract murals of sage and burnt Sienna behind. But the frame had held, the doors had held. The house, in the end, had held.

… Houses contain us; who can say what we contain?

(Groff 2018, 99-100)

Slowly, through reading, she became aware of the way the demands of a language can change you. She became a different person in French: colder, more elegant, more retrained. She is most herself in French, she hopes.