Life & Place · A Decembers list
The weather that made the whole town stop
The power went out and stayed out. Someone lit candles. Outside, the wind was doing something you'd never heard wind do, and you sat in the hallway with your back against the wall and waited.
This is the list for the storms and shakes you were there for. One line names the day; more comes when the day earned it.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
You can still hear the sound the pressure made against the windows, and feel exactly who was gripping your hand when it finally went quiet.
The weather service logs the wind speed and the barometric pressure and the path across the map. It does not log that your mother kept a transistor radio going all night, or that the neighbor you barely knew showed up the next morning with a chainsaw and a thermos. It does not know which tree in the yard came down, or that you never trusted that corner of the sky the same way again.
These are the days a whole town remembers together, which is exactly why they slip away as private memory — everyone assumes someone else has it written down. A list catches it one storm at a time. The name of the hurricane, how many hours the sirens ran, who you were hugging when the lights came back on. You would never sit and write the chapter, but you can put down the one line today, and the next one when it comes back to you.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
What ends up on this list
The ones with names
Hurricanes and the big blizzards get names, and the name becomes shorthand for a whole week of your life. You remember where you rode it out, what you boarded up, and how long it took the power crews to reach your street. Some names you'll never say without a little weight behind them.
The ground itself moving
An earthquake gives no warning, so what you remember is the split second of not understanding — the dishes walking off the shelf, the hanging lamp swinging, the strange animal quiet just before. You count the aftershocks for days and flinch at every truck that rumbles by.
The sirens and the sky
A tornado siren at supper time sends everyone to the basement or the hall closet. The sky goes green, the air goes still, and you wait. Sometimes it passes two counties over; sometimes you come up to find the neighbor's barn is gone and yours is untouched.
By the kind of storm
- Hurricanes
- The days-long wait — the run on plywood and bottled water, the evacuation traffic, and the slow drip of the roof once the eye had passed.
- Tornadoes
- Minutes, not days: the siren, the dash for cover, and the strange randomness of what survived and what didn't.
- Earthquakes
- No warning at all, then the long tail of aftershocks and the cracked plaster you kept meaning to fix.
- Floods
- The water that came up slow and stayed, the sandbag line, and the high-water mark someone penciled on the wall.
- Blizzards
- The whiteout that shut the roads for days, the furnace working overtime, and the neighbor you dug out together.
- Wildfires
- The orange sky at noon, the ash on the car, and the hour you decided what to load and what to leave behind.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of the days the sky won and the town held together anyway
Every one of these left a mark on the place and on you. Start with the storm you talk about most — the one everybody in the family still brings up — and put down what you remember.