That's right, kids, the theme for today is flood. It just keeps coming up, and I can't fight it anymore.
It has been raining heavily for two days, plus raining a little off and on for a week. If I'm reading the maps right, my neighborhood has received at least five inches of rain in the last 48 hours, maybe more. I know today I was amazed by how long the deluge lasted. Normally the really heavy downpours last only a few minutes, but today, it just kept on going. I stood on the porch and watched it pour over the gutters, soaking those new fascia boards that were such an issue to be installed back in February. My poor dogs were so bored, when I refused to let them go in and out of the back door repeatedly all day, their favorite make-mommy-annoyed game. One of the local tv stations posted area photographs on its website, one featuring a police cruiser flooded up to the top of its wheel wells, reportedly in my neighborhood. I spent a good twenty minutes scouring Google maps to figure out that it was a couple of stoplights away. I never went anywhere today, partly because of the heavy rain, so I didn't have to worry about drowning my little compact car. I've had just enough of a break from the precipitation, through August and September, to be glad for the free water, even if it is a mite too much. Coming in behind it is a cold front, and I welcome that with open arms. Open, bare, overheated arms.
This week last year, I was surveying the damage to my condos in Boulder, after the biblical-level floods of last September. A year later, one daughter has given up and moved out forever, and the other is still stuck in her sister's old unit while hers still has no cabinets, appliances, or floors. I've given my cabinet and trim preferences to the company doing the rebuild--the THIRD company--and now I have to send them links to my flooring choices. I have to make my case that an engineered product, a click and lock bamboo, is not actually an upgrade that will cost me money, considering we had travertine marble tiles covering approximately 50% of that condo. It's actually a downgrade, and I'm not going to pay extra for it.
I learned this evening that it is also the fifteenth anniversary of Hurricane Floyd, that struck North Carolina when I lived there, knocking out power throughout large portions of my city, and closing down most of the town, including the library where I worked. My only real memories of Floyd were its gigantic pink Doppler radar signature (thus, "Pink Floyd" to me), and seeing my librarian boss show up at work three days after the hurricane hit, wearing a t-shirt and shorts, not having had access to a shower or refrigerated food in all that time. She came in to work to clean up, and I realized how lucky I was that my home was not as affected as hers.
Not all my floods were literal today. It was the metaphorical one that hurt me most of all. I am running out of room on the chip in my phone that stores all my photos, and I went through deleting the old ones I've already transferred to the computer. I assume there is a way to delete them in groups, but I can't seem to find it, so I was going through one by one, judging what I'm ready to cease carrying at all times (even though I rarely look through the old pictures). There were over 3,400 pictures on the chip, and I managed to delete fewer than 400 of them in an evening. I knew it would be hard, when I hit the pictures from March and April, when I was letting the entire Pride outside to play in the Park, but it still took my breath away, how much it hurt to see the pictures of Cricket and Torden. It was like a cannonball to the chest, and it kept hitting me over and over, the flood of emotions when I saw them, looking old but still healthy in appearance. That wound is still too fresh, and every time I am reminded of what happened, it's like ripping off a giant scab. I have cried more tears than raindrops fell today, and there is just no end to it. I'm still drowning and I don't know how to save myself from it.
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