The Boy woke up this morning at four. Well, that’s what time it was when I finally looked at the clock. We finally got him calmed back down, we were back in bed, and the thought occurred to me: “It’s still raining.” It had gushed all day, with enough of a deluge in the morning that the drainage creek at the back of our backyard had overrun its banks again. Not nearly as badly as last year, but still a substantial amount of water.

“There goes our mulch,” I said, but it miraculously survived.

The basement was another story. It has flooded before, but K and I were hopeful, with all the dry weather we’d been having, that we wouldn’t have that problem. At four, I thought, “Better go check the basement.”

Probably three inches of water in the storage room. The crawl space was worse.

Lowes opens at six; I was there shortly after six. By around six forty, the newly-purchased pump, which pumps up to twenty-six gallons a minute, was at work.

Two hours later, it was still sending water gushing out.

Another hour later, it was a trickle but still going. So if we had an average of ten gallons of water a minute (a very conservative estimate, I think), that would be 600 gallons of water an hour. At three hours, that would be close to two thousand gallons. Is that possible? Two thousand gallons in the crawl space alone? It doesn’t seem possible.

But after looking at what happened in Amherstburg, Ontario, I realize how fortunate we were.