From In the Land of Good Living, a memoir, which was published last month by Knopf.

At my Miami Catholic school, we didn’t have snow days, naturally. We had hurricane days. A lot of them. Tropical storm days, too, and flash-flood days. Days on which the cancellation of class did not mean “where shall we sled?” but “will we have a place to sleep after this?”

Which is not to say that these days were gloomy. Oh, no. A strange glee arises throughout the peninsula on these worst days of the Mean Season. A kind of swaggering, both-hands-beckoning, devil-may-care…