Ella Seymour
I was sitting on the porch, sipping my morning tea, when the sky started to shift from pale blue to a darker, more ominous shade of grey. The radio crackled from the kitchen window, warning of a tropical storm forming to the southeast, but that didn’t bother me much. It was August, after all—hurricane season. We’ve learned to live with the threats, the way you learn to live with the sun setting every evening, a constant reminder of something bigger than yourself.
At 43 years old, I’ve spent most of my life here in Nassau, Bahamas, close enough to feel the city’s heartbeat but far enough that my little house by the shore still feels like a refuge. I grew up on Andros, where my family is from—an island of untouched beaches and secret blue holes. The solitude there is something you can't find on New Providence. But life brought me to Nassau, and I don’t regret it. This is where I built my life, raised my children, and found my own rhythm, somewhere between the rush of the city and the calm of the sea.
As I watched the sky, I thought back to the hurricane that tore through our islands a few years ago. The memory still feels raw, like an old scar that aches when the weather turns. My brother was the one who suffered the most. He’s tough, like most Andros men, but the storm knocked him down. A piece of debris sent him to the hospital and left our family house flattened to the ground. It took months of sweat and grit, and more help than we could have imagined, to rebuild.
The fear never really goes away, though. Every time a storm stirs up, I wonder if this will be the one that we can’t come back from. Some of the beaches I played on as a child have disappeared, swallowed by the ocean as if they were never there. Andros, they say, might be half-underwater in a few decades. It’s hard to imagine, but harder not to.
I sighed and took another sip of tea, the warmth grounding me for a moment. I know there’s only so much we can do—stock up, board up, pray—but I refuse to live in fear. We’re island people. We rebuild, we move on, we live. Life here isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass—it’s about learning to dance in the rain.