Let’s go home, Drea said.

The sisters spiraled down toward the Nord’s bright, complicated lights.

When I flew into Miami, all I seemed to see from the air was water. It was everywhere, the encroaching sea at the coast, and inland shining ribbons that sliced the landscape to pieces. Much of downtown Miami was protected, of course, but outlying districts, even just blocks away, were flooded. I was mildly shocked.

But the place still worked. Impressive causeways linked up the new islands, and I saw pod buses in chains like shining beads, navigating around the new archipelago much as in my childhood you could drive down the Keys from Largo to West.

A dutiful if reluctant son, I was returning to Florida. I hadn’t been back here for, shame to say it, over ten years. That’s a long time these days. It’s a changing world, and over such an interval change heaps up like a head of water behind a sandbank, and then bursts all over you.

Out of the airport, I took a pod bus down to Calle Ocho, 8th Street, and then a ferry. It was a smart, agile airboat, not much more than a sheet of plastic driven by an immense fan. My pilot was a girl, maybe twenty, with not a word of English. She made that little boat skim like a skateboard; it was a fun ride.

We headed into Little Havana. We squirmed through swarms of boats and yachts. There were people on Jet Skis and old Everglades swamp buggies and even battered tourist pedalos, many of them laden with stuff. Along Calle Ocho the boats and junks had been ganged together to make huge, ragtag floating markets: there were cafйs and tabaqueros, and floating stores selling cheap clothes, even bridal wear. Bugs and flies rose everywhere, great clouds of them, far more than I remembered from my childhood. But there were still old men playing dominoes in the Maximo Gomez Park, and in Memorial Boulevard, heavily sandbagged, the Eternal Torch still burned in honor of the Bay of Pigs counter-revolutionaries.