fun in threes, sometimes fours
general
We’ll be leaving for Poland tomorrow, but not the whole family. There’s the rub. Only L and I are going, for K and E have been a couple of times in the last few months. That makes the trip bittersweet. I’m excited to go: I haven’t visited my adopted homeland since 2010 (L hasn’t been since late 2011). Yet I’m not excited to leave behind K and E for an extended trip, and neither is the Girl.
“I don’t want to go without them,” has been a recurring theme in these last few days.
Sign Number 842 that the school year is over: a washing machine full of tennis balls.
Lately, Sundays and rain go together with us like any cliche classic pairing. A few weeks ago, during a friend's first communion, rain all day. Last week, when we were planning on having E's birthday party, rain through most of the day. Today, when we planned to go to the pool -- to squeeze in a visit before L and I head off to Polska -- rain through most of the day.
The forecast: scattered showers.
The reality: endless rain. But the Boy had fun running in the rain (the little bit we let him); the girls had fun chanting "Sun! Sun! Sun! Sun!" in an endless attempt to stop the rain; and we got some more rain.
Heaven knows we need it.
Rains, clouds, floods, puddles, mud, grey, damp, smeared, uninspired, uninspiring — after days and seeming days of this, to have a morning that looks like this is better than the cup of coffee in my hand.
We head down to our once-lake-front and take a look at what thousands of gallons of water flowing over a small area in a few minutes can do.
Mud, sand, limbs, leaves, cans — this is what it looks like after a flood.
Plants destroyed, swings caked in muck, belongings strewn through neighbors’ yards. I can only imagine what a real flood would be like.
We go out into the neighborhood, checking on what gifts others received, eventually heading over a couple of streets to a house we’d looked at when we were house hunting. It had been love at first sight. The yard was magnificent; the kitchen/dining area was open yet homey, almost cozy, with a fireplace in the corner. The full basement was finished on one half that opened out to a fenced dog run. Yet a friend advised against it: too much cracking in the foundation walls. “It won’t be a problem now,” he said, “but in a few years, it will cost some significant money to fix.”
We were heartbroken.
As we walk through the neighborhood, I remember that on the other side of the dog run was a small creek — a draining stream just like the one that runs behind our house, and so we head over to see. I couldn’t remember how much elevation there was between the drain and the house.
Not enough.
Talking to neighbors across the street who were out in the yard, we learned that the owners had well over a foot of water in their basement, and that the water had risen to just below the bottom of the window on the outside. I suddenly became very thankful for the two or three inches we found welling up through the slab in our basement.
"Why are you smiling, Mr. S?" they ask tearfully, as if to say, "How could you possibly be smiling at this moment? How could you treat our pain so cavalierly? Don't you have a heart?"
I'm smiling because it's good to see such obvious signs of close friendship. I'm smiling because the crying gives me a bit more faith in humanity.
It started around five. I called K to see if she'd need to stay late at work and asked her if it was raining.
"It's coming down pretty hard here," I explained.
And down it came, through dinner, through clean up time, into play time. E and I were by the window when I realized how significant the rainfall really was.
Sheets of rain; gusts of wind. I had these terrible images of one of the enormous trees in the backyard falling onto the house. What would we do? How could I protect my children, my wife?
And still it came down.
Looking into the backyard, I saw we had a lake. And it was growing. Within a few minutes, I realized why: the stream was no longer a stream. And within a few more minutes, we were all standing in the carport in shock.
But it was nothing compared to what I saw when I got to the neighbor's yard. Looking into her neighbor's yard, I saw something that literally made be question my grasp on reality. Water flowing out of the house. Pouring. Torrents running out of the house.
The poor folks were getting it from three directions.
Seeing the owner in the garage, I walked in and asked him if he needed help. I could only imagine what might be going on inside the house, and I thought if I could help him move anything at all to higher ground it would be more useful than standing around with a video camera in my hand.
Fortunately, at that point, nothing had gotten into the house. It was just flowing through his garage, he explained. He'd lived in the neighborhood for close to forty years, he explained, and he'd never seen anything remotely close to this.
I promised to return later to see if the situation had worsened and if he needed help.
It turned out, though, that we had our own issues to deal with.
"Where did the water come from?" K asked. Walls? Floor? Who knows. When this much rain falls in such a short time, the answer is probably, "All of the above."
I vacuumed for at least half an hour before I really felt I was making no progress at all.
"Surely I'm just imagining this," I muttered to myself. "Surely I'm making progress. I've emptied this thing at least ten or twelve times, and it supposedly holds sixteen gallons. That's a lot of water for it to show no change," I continued, still rambling to myself. (The more confused I am, the more likely I am to begin talking aloud to myself. Perhaps I'm not the only one?)
I decided to take a quick break and see if the water rose any. That would confirm my obvious suspicion that water was still flooding into the house.
By this time, though, the rain had almost stopped and the water was lower, almost returning to the confines of the small creek.
What remained was a fetid mess.
An expensive fetid mess: the house, about a half a mile away from our humble home, with a backyard so gloriously landscaped I thought it was a park, no longer had a beautiful garden. In its stead was a lake.
It was no Katrina. Flash flooding at the most. Still, enough of a view of what water can do to put famous floods into a more meaningful perspective.
Every summer it was the same: shoes came off in May and stayed off unless we were riding bikes. The bottoms of our feet went from light green in the early summer, a shade that we could bathe off daily, to dark forest green in August, a color that was almost impossible to scrub out.
We start now.
The garden is growing: snap peas are taking off and the tomatoes are fruiting abundantly thanks, I think, to a new pruning method recommended to me by the manager of a local university's organic garden. The grass seed I sprinkled almost haphazardly in the flat space among the trees at the base of our lot have sprouted finally. (The delay was due, in large measure, to simple neglect: it was an experiment. What happens if you just spread the seed and leave it alone? I guess we have our answer now.)
But that growth outside the house seems insignificant compared to what's developing inside: the Boy is a walker now, able to walk twenty or more steps before collapsing to his hands and knees for something more sure and more familiar.
Today a walker; tomorrow, a runner.
It all happens too quickly.