I'm getting this done early today because I have to have time to build my ark. We are in a line of rain that stretches from Missouri to Old Mexico. Awesome.

Trouble is, I was supposed to go get my dress for my sister's wedding and make sure all the alterations were done properly. Then I was finally going to get to sit down and have dinner with her. I have a feeling in my gut it's not going to happen.

The rain last night was amazing. A gully washer no doubt. The ground is saturated at this point and the water is just running off. We could even have hail and wind today--circulating wind. I'm nuts to go anywhere.

It was at precisely 10:41 AM on March 2, 2004 when Camilla Preston decided to stop smiling.

She looked at her picture in the Society page of the local paper. The Sunday paper. Today was Wednesday and it was the first time she'd been out of bed since the event. But look at that smile.

She was wedged between a dictator dowager and a back-stabbing buddy but still she smiled. It made her downright angry at the moment, as she stood there in Homer Simpson slippers and her favorite old yellow matted bathrobe. She tried to run the fingers of her left hand through her hair as she did whenever she was exasperated, but her fingers stuck in the tangles. Instead she wadded up the newspaper page and made her way to the kitchen where she stomped the toe kick of the trash can, tossed the crumpled page and let the lid slam in a most satisfying way.

She grabbed a heavy glass from the cabinet and clunked it on the counter beside the fridge. She pulled the door open and was momentarily shocked by the cold. There wasn't much to choose from, but the color of the orange juice was a cheerful color. She poured it, hoping to drink down some sunshine--something to get her going.

But as she sipped the tart juice she thought again of the picture in the paper. How could she possibly smile like that when she was surrounded by betrayal and deceit? Why was she so compelled to smile all the time?

She shuffled back to her living room to the shelves that lined the wall beside the big-screen television. Camilla squinted at the spines, looking for the few photo albums she thought she had, then remembering she'd started stuffing pictures in boxes because she was too busy to do much else. She dug in the cabinet underneath and pulled two out and turned the boxes upside down on the carpet. The pictures scattered like clunky flakes fighting with the pale green, gold and burgundy pattern of the carpet.

Camilla wasn't looking at anything but faces, particularly hers. Smiling. Grinning. Smiling again. But wasn't that what one did for pictures? There she was getting her last promotion. That was another time she'd slept for three days afterward. She'd pulled over 48 hours straight getting an important account untangled and there she stood, bright as a daisy, smiling like she'd just gotten the best night's sleep she'd ever had.

Well, she was through with that. Absolutely through. She didn't feel like smiling. She didn't feel like working. She didn't feel like answering the phone that had rung six times since she'd finally peeled herself from bed.

She felt like crying. And so that is what Camilla Preston did, sitting on her living room floor, watching blue-green LED reading on the VCR clock begin to swim before her eyes, looking like a jobless, nameless reject from high school, feeling like a reject from life. Something had to change. But first the old had to be washed away. From there grim determination would take over and the next time she smiled, it would be because she was happy, not because she was acting.