September 9th, 9:18 A.M.—Hurricane Irma is making landfall in less than 24 hours. Anxiety fumes are in the air—you could light a match and the room go up in flames.

I’m in a Holiday-Inn lobby. This place is overrun with people. The desk clerk tells me that most guests are evacuees from south and central Florida.

In the main area: televisions are playing—volume cranked high. A few families gather around screens with worried faces.

I meet a Miami man.

“I’m pretty stressed right now,” he says. “We’re crammed in two rooms. My mother’s eighty-three, man. She don’t travel well.”

If the hurricane hits where forecasts predict, he’ll lose his home and his business.

He goes on, “I worked eight years finding new clients. All those twelve-hour workdays, my livelihood is gonna disappear.”

He snaps his fingers.

“This is my wakeup call, dude,” he adds. “I’ve spent too much time with my business, not enough time with my son.”

I meet a woman. Late sixties, wiry, with white cropped hair.

“Lost my husband two months ago to cancer,” she says. “And this hurricane might

destroy our house, where we raised our kids.”

A few weeks ago, she started riding a bike to help fight depression. She brought the bike with her to help release nervous energy.

“I told God this morning,” she says. “Go ahead, take my house. It's all just stuff anyway. I'm just grateful to have my kids with me this weekend.”

I meet a man with a long beard. He is six-four, and roughly the size of a General Electric refrigerator. His family lives in Central Florida.

“I'm with my wife and son,” he says. “But my mama and baby sister are evacuating now, they're still stuck traffic.”

He shows me a cellphone photo of a traffic jam.

“My sister’s freaking out,” he says. “She’s twelve. I try to tell her funny stories to make her laugh.”

His…

SEPTEMBER 7th, 9:29 A.M.—Hurricane Irma is close enough to smell. Most of Florida lives within the geographical area meteorologists are labeling the “Run-Like-Holy-Hell Zone.”

I’m eating a late breakfast at Waffle House. I am the only customer here. George Strait sings in the background.

The woman behind the counter is in her late sixties. She is lean, rough features. Her voice is like a pack of Camels.

The regular fry-cook is gone. He has evacuated town. She’s here alone until the replacement cook shows.

She takes my order, then cooks my breakfast herself. She is a go-getter, this woman, she knows how to cook an egg.

I ask if she’s worried about Irma.

“Ain’t worried about nothing,” she says. “Been through too many hurricanes to worry about this little old storm.”

Irma isn’t a “little old” anything.  Irma is wider than the SEC, stronger than forty-mule-team Borax, and heading straight up the pant-leg of Florida.

The woman delivers my plate, refills my coffee. We talk.

Her husband was killed when they were newlyweds, long ago. She raised two children on her own. It

was no cakewalk.

Every summer, she managed to take them to Disney World as kids. She saved her pennies and dimes to do it.

“Family vacations was important to me. Used to stay in an RV park, only we was the ONLY tent, between all them big rigs.”

After raising her kids, she should’ve been cruising Easy Street. But that’s not how it happened. Her daughter got pregnant and returned home with two grandbabies.

She raised them while her daughter attended college.

Today, her daughter is a registered nurse in Birmingham. Her grandkids are in college. Her son lives in Albuquerque. They are successes, and they make her so proud her teeth are showing.

“That’s my daughter,” she says pointing to a cellphone photo. “She's pretty, ain't she?”

I hear melancholy in her voice. I’m not the…

September 6th, 11:13 A.M.—Hurricane Irma is moving closer. And it looks like the storm is getting angrier every few hours.

Here in the Panhandle you can see people gathered around TV’s and cellphone weather videos everywhere you go.

Walmart is a nuthouse. They are out of bottled water, milk, bleach, toilet paper, bread, and according to one official, they’re running dangerously low on ketchup.

People wander through the store with tight faces. There is a man wearing a homemade T-shirt that reads: “Irma Sucks.”

In the peanut-butter aisle, I see a child who follows his mother’s cart. The woman is stocking her buggy with essentials.

The kid holds a cellphone, volume turned up. I hear the tinny voice of a weather report.

The little boy says, “Mom, are we gonna be okay?”

Mom turns to him. She gives him a warm look. It’s the same sweet look mothers have been giving children since the invention of the diaper.

It’s a look that says: “Everything—no matter how afraid you are—is going to be alright.”

It's the same look my mama gave me when a swarm of red ants crawled up my legs and bit the Holy Spirit out of me. I had an allergic reaction, trouble breathing.

“Mama,” I said. “Will I pull through?”

She gave me that look, and here I am.

I also see an old woman. She is frail, she walks bent over. She’s searching for bottled water on barren shelves.

A female employee notices her. She asks what the woman needs.

“Where am I gonna find water?” the old woman asks. “What am I gonna do?”

The employee gives the elderly woman that look—the same one I was just telling you about.

“Let’s…

Somewhere in Alabama—a white clapboard building. The place is a trip backward in time. The steeple was added during the Great War. The cemetery is even older.

It’s a weeknight. Small-town kids play tag on the church lawn.

A mother barks: “Be nice to your sister!”

I meet an old woman who has been the church organist since Davy Crockett sailed the ocean blue.

A black-and-white image of her hangs in the fellowship hall. Think: big hair, petite frame, and one metric ton of eye makeup.

“Wasn’t I pretty?” she asks.

She still is.

Anyway, I have never seen a covered-dish party this size for a church so small. There are more casseroles than there are forks.

One old woman says, “Some of our ladies usually bring two, maybe three dishes. Willie Sue brought the tea.”

Willie Sue.

There are plenty of elderly people here. Several younger ones in their late forties and fifties, too.

One man says, “I came back last year. Used to

work in the big city, for a company that built smartphones. I was miserable. Doctor said my blood pressure was through the roof.”

He quit his job, and he left the tech field. He moved home and started attending potlucks again. They elected him janitor.

Today, he carries the church key ring and takes out the trash.

I meet another man who is missing his right arm below the elbow—a hunting accident. He cooks hamburgers on the grill, using a prosthetic hook.

“When I lost my arm,” he says. “The whole church chipped in and delivered suppers for a year, they never skipped.”

Three hundred and sixty-five foil-covered plates.

The children in the congregation are few. There is only…