Storms Are Easy, Marriage Is Hard
A novel revisits Hurricane Hazel and Marilyn Bell’s famous swim October 2010
The year was 1954, the season autumn, the climactic event a furious hurricane that swept up from the Caribbean into Canada and tore through Toronto, washing out bridges and houses, leaving 4,000 homeless and 81 dead, many of the bodies found stuck in trees the next morning by the bloated Humber River. I was not living in Toronto at the time—October 1954—but an aunt was and that is what she told me about Hurricane…