I just returned from a trip to England visiting towns northeast of London – where my mother’s relatives lived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – searching for churches where they had worshiped before their immigration to the New World.

The atmospheric river that came was truly an inundation. Torrential rain for days caused mudslides, rivers to swell and burst their banks, roads and bridges to dissolve into nothing, and waters suddenly rising to dangerous levels and consuming homes, farms, and land.