So apparently at some point over the last couple weeks, we moved from the sunny locale of Austin, Texas, to what I can only assume is Seattle. Actually, not even Seattle – Bangladesh, perhaps? Someplace with a monsoon season, that much I know. It’s been raining for a couple weeks now – every now and then the sun will pop out for a fleeting visit, but then it fades away behind yet another rain-laden cloud bank.
But last night, as Rick and I watched a recorded episode of “Hell’s Kitchen” (the show that reminds me so much of my older brother Bob – the ex-chef-turned-fishing-guide…), we noticed the clouds seemed to have dispersed, and the setting sun was glowing orange in the mostly-clear sky. So we decided to head outside for a walk, even after we noticed some rather menacing-looking clouds off in the distance. We stuck close to the house for a few minutes, watching the brooding sky, keeping an eye out for tell-tale flashes within the building clouds. But after several minutes of searching for lightning and seeing none, we decided we were safe to walk a bit longer and venture away from the house.
We made it through almost our entire 2.6 mile walk before we started feeling the first drops of rain. And it wasn’t even bothersome – on the contrary, after walking more than two miles in the warm, humid night, a few drops of cool rain and a brisk breeze felt nice. When we got home, I jumped in the shower to clean up, and as soon as I was finished and turned off the water, I heard the familiar sound of a downpour hitting the roof. “Do you hear that?” Rick shouted through the bathroom door, “We got back just in time.” Yep. I went out to the family room couch and turned on the TV, which was in the middle of its usual temperamental loss-of-satellite-signal-in-the-rain struggles. It cut in and out a couple times, but then the rain seemed to let up and the signal was back and all was well. And it was getting rather late, so I decided to head off to bed with the hope that the rain was over…
But some time between brushing my teeth and crawling into bed, the rain started again. And this time it meant business. I mean, I’m quite used to thunderstorms and downpours and the sound of unrelenting rain – but usually, no matter how UNrelenting it sounds, it does, eventually, RELENT. Storms pop up, the downpour starts, maybe some lightning and thunder… but after fifteen or twenty minutes, it moves on and finds another landscape to soak. But last night, as I stared up at my bedroom ceiling with my blanket clutched under my chin, the pounding rain refused to surrender. It kept raining. And raining. And raining. And then the thunder and lightning started. There was no way I could fall asleep with that cacophony of weather outside. With my eyes wide open and my ears tuned in to every thunder clap, I suddenly had a thought – our pool, which had already been more full than usual because of all the rain we’ve had, must’ve been filling up quickly. I got out of bed and walked out to the door to the back porch. I turned on the porch light, and peeked outside. Sure enough, the pool was within two inches of overflowing.
So I ran back to Rick’s study, where he has a perpetual weather radar window open on his computer (Rick is a bit of a weather aficionado… he’s usually better at predicting the weather than the meteorologists on TV…). “Is this gonna be over soon?” I asked. To which Rick bluntly answered, “nope.” He showed me on the radar how this little bitty red blob had formed directly over our neighborhood – and instead of moving on, like storms are supposed to, this one was PARKED overhead, forming and reforming and feeding on itself like a freak cannibal thunderhead. It LOOKED like a small storm – but because it wasn’t moving, it felt like a storm the size of, well, Texas. (Okay, maybe New Jersey.)
After about another half hour of the deluge, the pool overflowed for the first time since we’ve had it. I’ve never seen that much rain in such a short time. Rick, surprisingly, seemed much less distressed about the overflowing pool than I was. I guess because there was absolutely nothing we could do about it until the rain and lightning stopped. I had the TV in the bedroom on, tuned to the weather channel… the signal, of course, was missing throughout the downpour. I decided I wasn’t going to try to sleep until that TV came back on. Because once the signal was back, I’d know the rain was letting up. It was almost one o’clock when it finally came back, and the sound of the rain grew faint, and the thunder stopped. Rick went outside and drained some of the water from the pool, so today it’s back to where it was before last night’s storm – unfortunately, even as I type this, another downpour has begun, and I’m back to my post at the porch door, keeping an eye on the ever-rising water.
By the way, does anyone know how to build an ark??
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