This experience of flood forces my husband and me to face unpalatable realities of our life as expats. First, we act even in times of crisis on thin information. Our ability to "monitor local media," as U.S. embassy alerts advise, is low. As the floodwater approached Bangkok, we could observe how other people took precautions, by stowing cars on upper floors of the parking garage at a mall, for example, or buying up batteries, eggs, and diapers at the supermarket.
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This month, we feature an essay from our archives: Five Minutes by Dionne Ford. In this essay, Dionne describes a morning where she and her family find themselves running late from the minute they get out of bed. Once everyone is dressed, fed, and delivered to their morning destinations, she wrestles with how to best use the three hours she has to herself.
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Tonsil is small but equipped with a killing
claw, throwback to Deinonychus,
killer Utahraptor of ferocious talons and
better than T-Rex
which was just a scavenger. ...
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Hopping down the block like the sidewalk's on fire,
a puppety girl trips as her left foot flaps
and goes spastic airborne, fearless
of falling
though her mother dives under her to fix
it with her body and paranoid love. ...
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Don't fool yourself. Don't waste your time with that. It's better to eat now and drink water, and wine, also, because later on there will be no stopping, no respite, no sleep and no meal. ...
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Dear Large Dark Male:
How is your hairless head? I lay
in the bed and think
of licking it like at
the cage place. ...
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Four-year-old Leah and I decide to get
take-out Chinese for dinner.
I head for the door, turn around
and there's Leah stripping down.
Off come the jeans, panties, and yellow t-shirt.
Actually...I like pink today, she says. ...
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The Easter Bunny is white fluff
with a blue velveteen coat and glasses askew.
He's old, Leah whispers.
Bunnies get old too, I say.
Can I talk to him?
You can try. ...
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Obama is too churchy, Leah says.
What does 'churchy' mean? I ask.
I don't know, she says, shrugging
her shoulders.

Leah does understand politics
closer to home...
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Each time I pour the liquid into the nebulizer, hold the blue tube up to your tiny pursed mouth, I wonder: If I had loved you more, would this still happen? The 37 weeks I dreaded your existence. You sound like Darth Vader the way you wheeze, your jowls barely moving but chest heaving above that baby fat stomach. Do your lungs fill with longing to be loved?
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He loves the shape-word crescent, another Montessori-ism, like 'peaceful hands', and 'work'. You explain how the moon is still whole but we can't see it, we have to suspend our belief you hear yourself saying to a four year-old. Like when I know there is a bottom of the bathtub under all the bubbles? Yes, exactly.
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Ellen Meeropol is a mother to two, grandmother to one, and a nurse practitioner by training. She graduated from Stonecoast's MFA program in 2005, and took early retirement from full-time nursing to devote herself to writing fiction. Her first novel, House Arrest, was published in February 2011 by Red Hen Books.
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Normalcy as Fiala and her family knew it disappeared that Labor Day weekend, with all the speed of blood rushing through a ruptured artery. The "normal" of family life and work -- swimming pools, birthday parties, weekend brunches served on blue-and-white dishes -- vanished into a new reality of round-the-clock shifts in intensive care, eyes glued to monitors, shunts, and drains, wondering if Jeremy would pull through and, if he did, how his life would be forever changed.
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