When the Water Comes to the Door
Last week, France was struck by flooding of a scale described in many places as historic. Here in my adopted home of Maine-et-Loire, the impact has been particularly severe. As of today — Sunday 22 February 2026 — the département remains on red alert, with swollen rivers breaching banks, roads cut, neighbourhoods isolated and entire landscapes temporarily reclaimed by water.
In Angers, Mayor Christophe Béchu — formerly France’s Minister for Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion — reported that the River Maine had reached levels not seen in decades. Across the region, residents have watched the water rise with a mixture of stoicism, anxiety and weary familiarity: furniture lifted, sandbags stacked, travel plans abandoned, daily routines reduced to waiting.
This is not a call to panic. Nor is it an exercise in apocalyptic rhetoric. It is simply an invitation to notice. Because climate change rarely announces itself with theatrical flourish. More often, it arrives as inconvenience: a closed road, a cancelled train, a damp cellar, a school shut for safety. Only gradually does inconvenience accumulate into disruption, and disruption into something that begins to reshape how a place lives.
What makes events like this unsettling is not only their scale, but their frequency. Floods, droughts, heatwaves and storms are no longer isolated anomalies; they are becoming part of the background rhythm of life across much of the world — from the Loire Valley to the Ganges delta, from California to the Sahel.
In The Three Mosquito Nets, the story travels through places where climate change is not debated but lived: farmers negotiating shifting seasons, coastal communities watching shorelines retreat, families adapting quietly because adaptation is the only option available. The book does not preach solutions. It listens.
Standing on a familiar street now transformed into a temporary canal, one realises how thin the line is between “there” and “here”. Between a distant humanitarian headline and a personal experience. Between sympathy and participation. It would be easy — and comforting — to frame this solely as a natural disaster, an unfortunate meteorological coincidence. Yet the broader scientific consensus points to a warming climate intensifying the water cycle: wetter wet periods, drier dry periods, and extremes that stretch infrastructure and communities beyond what they were designed to withstand. None of this requires abandoning modern life, nor embracing ascetic virtue as a badge of moral purity. Respect for the environment is not about rejecting progress; it is about recognising limits. The same ingenuity that built our cities can help preserve them — if we choose foresight over complacency.
For now, though, the immediate reality is simpler. People check river gauges. Insurance forms are downloaded. Volunteers fill sandbags. Neighbours help neighbours move belongings upstairs. Life narrows to essentials.
And the water waits for no one.
If there is a lesson here — one echoed throughout The Three Mosquito Nets — it is that climate change is not primarily a story about temperature charts or policy debates. It is a story about vulnerability, resilience and the quiet dignity with which ordinary people confront forces larger than themselves.
This is not alarmism. It is observation.
And perhaps, just perhaps, a reminder that the places we call home are more fragile — and more precious — than we like to believe.
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