The cab driver pulls up to my parents’ house in the early evening at golden hour. The snow from this morning’s blizzard has settled, amplifying the twilight’s warmth, as though an artist brushed over everything with the fiery hue of a sunflower.

My colonial childhood home stands illuminated. Its elegance reminds me of my mother, Rosie.

She loathed its modest size. She’s dead.

I’ve always cherished this house, and it’s at least partially why I’m here. I want to know who will inherit it now that my parents are both gone from this world.

My younger brother, Gino? My favorite uncle, Donny? Both are living here. Whereas I haven’t been back to Fox Chapel, a Pittsburgh suburb with more country clubs than gas stations, in at least five years.

After I left my ex-husband, Wayne, Rosie told me I was no longer welcome home.

“That’s not what good wives do!” she hollered at Thanksgiving that year.

“He beat me!” I exclaimed while ducking under the table, barely missing her flying fork.

When I re-emerged, I saw Gino just sitting there, laughing, chomping so that I could see chunks of turkey in his mouth. I resisted picking the fork up off the floor and shoving it down his throat.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Last December, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida asked two high-level aides at a meeting in his office if any elected state prosecutors were “not enforcing the law.”

It was a brief and unprompted inquiry, one of the aides said later in a deposition. But it soon led to the Republican governor zeroing in on Tampa’s top prosecutor, Andrew H. Warren, a Democrat with a progressive policy bent. In August, flanked by law enforcement officers, Mr. DeSantis made the startling announcement that he was suspending Mr. Warren from office, chiefly for pledging that he would not prosecute those who seek or provide abortions.

Whether the suspension violated Mr. Warren’s free speech rights and represented an overreach of the governor’s executive authority are now questions before a federal judge in a trial that began on Tuesday in Tallahassee, the state capital. Mr. Warren had sued Mr. DeSantis, seeking to be reinstated.

“It’s been 117 days since the governor suspended democracy,” Mr. Warren said outside the federal courthouse in downtown Tallahassee before the trial got underway. “A trial is the search for the truth, and, in this building, the truth matters.”

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Along the Gulf Coast of Florida, whose history is punctuated by the passage and destruction

of major hurricanes, millions of residents on Monday were anxiously watching forecasts, stocking up on groceries and

preparing as best they could for the expected arrival of Hurricane Ian.

The authorities urged residents to begin evacuating some low-lying areas, with a troubling combination of dangerous

storm surges, flooding and powerful winds predicted for the coming days.

“Safety is paramount,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news briefing, asking Floridians to take the threat seriously. “There

is going to be damage.”

The National Hurricane Center said early Tuesday that Ian had become a major hurricane — meaning Category 3 or

stronger, with winds of at least 111 miles per hour — as it neared Cuba. It was expected to remain so over the next day.

MEXICO BEACH, Fla. — Peggy Wood’s beloved hotel, the Driftwood Inn, was nearly obliterated when Hurricane Michael hit the area as a Category 5 storm in 2018.

A friend of hers who rode out that hurricane “filmed the Driftwood through the whole storm,” Ms. Wood, 81, said, and it looked from the front as though it had survived.

“But when we got here, the whole back of it was gone,” she said. “It’s just the front wall was standing there, perfect.”

The Wood family, which has owned the Driftwood since 1975, rebuilt it and reopened on June 8, 2022. The hotel has been reconfigured to withstand more serious storms. Hurricane Ian poses the first real test of its resilience.

I’ve been watching a high-profile court case this week in Tallahassee where Florida Planned Parenthood groups and others have sued the state over its 15-week abortion ban.

Those organizations prevailed on Thursday — for now.

Judge John C. Cooper gave a verbal ruling in court Thursday saying that Florida’s 15-week ban was unconstitutional on its face because it violates Florida’s explicit right to privacy, which is more robust than the federal constitution’s implied right to privacy, and stands even though Roe v. Wade was overruled last Friday.

“This order complies with the present state of law in Florida,” Cooper said in court on Thursday.

But the case is far from decided.

A Florida judge will decide on Thursday whether to block enforcement of the state’s new 15-week abortion ban, which is set to take effect on Friday.

The law, similar to the Mississippi statute at the heart of the Supreme Court case that overturned Roe v. Wade last week, was signed this spring by Gov. Ron DeSantis. It includes no exceptions for cases of rape or incest.

Health care providers argued before a Florida judge on Monday that the state’s new ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy violates the state constitution, and urged the court to block its enforcement.

The law, signed this spring by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is set to take effect on Friday. Regardless of the Supreme Court ruling that struck down Roe v. Wade last week, the Florida plaintiffs argue that the new law violates the state constitution’s protection of individual privacy rights. In previous rulings, that has been interpreted to include the right to abortion.

Protesters across the country expressed their fury on Tuesday night about the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that strongly suggests Roe v Wade will soon be overturned. Crowds marched and chanted in support of abortion rights in San Francisco and New York, in Chicago and Atlanta, in Houston and Salt Lake City.

The legislation is modeled after an abortion law in Mississippi that the Supreme Court appears poised to uphold in a ruling expected this summer.

A state contractor hasn't been paying health providers, who may soon be forced to shutter.

I’ve returned to the Florida lawmaking session this week. It officially began on Tuesday in Tallahassee, the state capital, a government and university town tucked into the rural northern Florida panhandle.

Tallahassee is also where large oak trees grow as if from a story book, complete with luscious hanging Spanish moss, and where I have lived since 2017.

The state legislative session is 60 days long and occurs annually either in January or March, depending on whether it’s an election year. Midterm races will be held this year, so the session is early, so lawmakers can get out early to raise money for their campaigns. They can’t fundraise during session.

I missed the 2021 session while recovering from cancer. It was the first pandemic session, since 2020's had already wrapped by the time the virus spread here, when there were many Covid policies in place.

Those policies are gone now, and I’m back. And, it’s weird.

I was in Sarasota, Florida over Memorial Day weekend when I realized my 22-lb terrier Lily was probably struggling with a urinary tract infection.

Our experience with the local veterinarian left me so jealous of Lily's health care that I wish I could adopt it for myself.

What was so great?

We had upfront and transparent prices, for one. But it was also easy to book a same-day appointment. The vet’s assistant called our Tallahassee vet for Lily’s recent medical history, and she offered to treat Lily not only for her UTI, but also for her routine maintenance.

It didn't end there.

People sometimes ask me why I beat up so much on hospitals.

It's because they get most everything they want from lawmakers, and then, they complain they didn't get enough.

Look no further than the most recent Florida legislative session as an example:

Hospitals succeeded in largely prohibiting patients from suing them for covid-related medical malpractice.

They successfully lobbied to repeal a new law that hadn't even gone into effect yet that would have required them to report to the state their tax-deductible community benefits.

They preserved $300 million in additional Medicaid, and they managed to increase payments to Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa by at least $10 million annually.

And they successfully fought at least 10 other bills, including some that would have forced hospitals to:

• Visibly list prices for 300 common procedures.

• Pay parents of adult children they negligently kill.

• Notify the state of their mergers and acquisitions.

When I came home from the hospital, the story goes, Joseph held me in his arms so tenderly that my mom had a hard time pulling me away.

I was just a newborn and so I don't remember, but I have seen a photo of us like that, me tiny and him just a loving four-year-old big brother.

He was wild, even as a kid, making his sweetness to me even sweeter.

Everyone but me in the family called him Jose, for short, as my dad's name was already Joe. My grandma called him Joe-boy.

But he was always Joseph to me, my big brother, who made my world so complicated and deep.

Joseph suffered since he was born from a vague mood disorder that left him somewhere on the spectrum between manic depression and schizophrenia. It's a horrible disease that has taken more lives in my family than any other, like cancer for instance, which plagues my father and me and others.

On Wednesday, at the Economic Club of Florida, hospital executive Alan Levine had an urgent message for his colleagues: We need to get out of the hospital business.

Hospitals’ current business model of treating patients for acute problems is too expensive, Levine said.

Hospitals can no longer wait for sick people to show up in their emergency rooms. Instead, they must take a proactive approach to community health care. The future of health care is preventing health problems in the first place.

And when patients do have health problems, they should be treated in their homes — not during expensive hospital stays.

In short: Hospitals need to aggressively seek out new ways to make money and rely less on charging exorbitant sums to treat people at their facilities.