Everything was beautiful, the day, the weather, traffic, the sound of the children; it was almost too good to be true. I waited for my family to return while watching the lake from my window.

It was beautiful. The water was extremely mesmerizing; it was so blue, full and swaying over the shore, gently forceful nature of its own.

I proceeded to go over to the stove and turn the oven on and prepare for everyone to enter the apartment. The food aroma would meet them at the door if I timed everything right.

I completed the meal and decided to lay down and low and behold, my people walked through the door. They were pleasantly pleased to smell food already prepared.

We enjoyed each other’s company for the next 3 hours. Preparing for the rest of the evening, we all decided to look out of the window. The lake was even more magnetic and soothing, the water rolling over the shore, however it was elevated and a bit more aggressive.

Preparing for bed now, I made my final round to secure the house and prepare for bed and there were such a soothing sound from the lake that I recall taking a deep breathe not paying much attention to the details much. There was a silence that was so tranquil this night. The building was silent, the children weren’t running through the halls, the atmosphere was perfect.

I proceeded to lay down and was woken up to the soothing sound of water whooshing gently about the building.

Alarmed by the sound, I was prompted to rise from my deep sleep against my tranquility to look out of the window! Oh my there was water from the ground up to about the 11th floor of my 26 floored building!

I ran to each room, alarming everyone, John ran to neighbors to alert them to prepare to leave. We automatically retrieved our emergency bags and the children and began to seek ways to escape this matter! We decided to exit through the window. However, we had to figure how we would not drown. As we proceeded, we noticed that there were calm rescue boats and rescuers braving the waves.

They prompted us to send everyone to their windows and remain calm because the rest of the building tenants were safe and we were too.

We fought with a screen finally being ripped out as we were placed in the boat which was one of many. They placed us with a rowboat which would take us to the great big boat docked in a whole other place about 2 hrs away.We were greeted with big white towels, split up based on gender; we were showered, fed and reunited.

We met in the holding place they call it. We first chatted it up hugging with relief that each of us made it, asking questions, swapping stories. While sitting there we began to focus on the workers there.

They were so orderly with their uniforms on and big smiles the entire time while reassuring us that everything was fine. They were so animated like a train of ants leading back to the colony but they always smiled.

We thought to stop the action for a moment to ask a few questions. We stopped one lady who wore pinned hair, red lipstick, a bounce in her step while walking by holding a syringe.

We proceeded with “excuse me” and we got her attention  so she stopped over and we had all kinds of questions and she had answers.

While asking questions, we heard a series of alarms. The last one was the most noticeable.

Then I woke up…