It has been five days and they still haven’t arrived.

I sit on the wraparound porch, weathered by decades of storms, spiral winds from the south and icy blasts from the north wreaking havoc on the flimsy shelter we call our home. I watch the horizon, past the fields of our farm that haven’t yielded a full crop in a decade, past the barn that collapsed into a pile of smoked and rotten wood after the fire, and am...