The Big Rain

We had ourselves a real rollicking-good rainstorm on Saturday afternoon.  I’d say it was somewhere between your typical tropical downpour and a typhoon.  It had been overcast and muggy most of the day, but around 3:00 the sky went from gray to dark gray to black-green.  Our normal plans for an afternoon walk got put on hold as the first big drops started to fall, and soon the street in front of our house was a small river.  Schoolkids who had gone to class in sunny, hot weather now had to bike home in a tempest.  We saw them wheeling past our gate, soaking wet, laughing—for the most part—as they went.  In rainstorms like this it doesn’t matter if you’ve got an umbrella or a poncho (or even a roof over your head, sometimes), you’re just plain going to get soaked and you might as well enjoy it.

Well, just when we thought it was about to wrap up, the rain started to pound even harder and that’s when I shot the video that you see below.  There’s just something about the raw power of crazy weather phenomena that makes me want to go out and get drenched.  I missed my calling as a storm chaser, I think.  In the video I walk down to the end of our little street but dare not venture any further, because the wind in the cross-street is whipping at a good 20-30 mph.  “Sheets of rain,” (which is usually just a figure of speech) were quite literally draping themselves all over the place.  I was standing in the lee of a building and still getting pounded.

But it was when I came back from my little venture outside that things got really interesting at our house.  I was just about to head upstairs and change out of my wet clothes when I noticed a small (but quickly growing) waterfall draining straight down our stairway into our living room.  I grabbed some towels and followed our new, unwelcome indoor water feature upstream to see where it was coming from.  On the third floor, a small lake on our balcony had overflowed into our storage room and was cascading out of the room, onto the landing and from there dropping straight down to our first floor. 

So there I was, soaking wet, bailing water off our balcony (the drain has been plugged for who knows how long) with water cascading down three flights of stairs behind me.  At that very moment, a leak which we’ve noticed before in our kitchen floor decided to bubble over so Joelle was occupied with a flood of water there.  Micah sat in about the only dry spot in our house, playing with Play-Doh, while Sedakah bounced happily in her chair, oblivious to the whole situation.  For a while it felt like we were on a tropical version of the Titanic, but finally it subsided and we were left with nothing more than a few stray puddles of water to clean up.  We tidied up, rinsed off and had dinner, thankful for the cooler weather…and for a house with tile floors.