MORNING HAS BROKEN

Another Sunday Scribble, another Memory.

I reach into my secret place of memorable mornings. The morning after giving birth to my daughter, the morning I woke up an honest woman, the morning I awoke a college student in a dorm room in Murray Kentucky, the morning I was driving up US 119 into the Smoky Mountains and the golden sun light dancing through the canopy of trees gave everything the most surreal brilliant glow that it stays in my mind like a magnificent masterpiece.

Perhaps the most dramatic was a morning in Cancun last October. I was not certain if that morning would ever arrive.

My husband and I were vacationing in Mexico when hurricane Wilma arrived. When I use the word, dramatic, I do not use it lightly. We were herded into a shelter the day before the storm was to arrive. The next afternoon, the roof began to lift off, not being able to withstand the growing fury of the wind.

I had a heavy feeling of doom. Panic was rising from my stomach and making its way to my mind as I watched the roof lift and fall showing us the violence in the sky. 2500 of us were evacuated as quickly as possible to seek out other shelters before the storm reached land.

Approximately 25 of us boarded a bus and headed into the storm. We were let off at a school in the heart of Cancun and we ran, being pursued by the trees beginning to loose root, and the 100 miles per hour rain and wind battering us.

We landed in a room with the random selection of 25 other soaked and scared souls. We became close family for the next five days.

We locked ourselves in and waited for Wilma to hit. It was 6pm.

Wilma began her assault on Cancun at 7. The sky turned black and the wind became an unrelenting roar that did not cease for the next 12 hours.

I prayed all night. I used my fingers as rosary beads. We were in pitch black, hearing only the sounds of breathing and the murmur of pray, and the soft offerings of assurance to those most frightened. Evil sounds swirled around the outside. Trees flying into the building, metal sheets disengaged from the shacks surrounding us slammed into the sides of the school, the occasional wailing of an animal, and the most horrifying of all, the sounds of humans still out there.

No one slept. We waited. Waited for it to pass or swallow us.

As morning approached, the wind began to calm. The rain no longer beat against the walls forcing her way into the small room through the wooden slat windows.

A total calm arrived in time.

Morning broke.

And we ventured outside to see what remained. The whole area was under water, the trees tossed about like rag dolls, Stunned local folk came to the school, tentatively at first, then as friends bearing what food they could offer and the little information available.

It was the eye of the storm.

And in time we were forced back into the room for a second siege of Wilma. She was smitten with Cancun and spent another night making violent overtures to her.

We all knew we would survive to see the next morning.