When the Levee Breaks, You Got No Place to Go

Oklahoma is a national disaster area as always this morning. It's raining for the first time in a billion years and the town resembles nothing so much as the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Our house is built on relatively lower ground, so every spring the rain puts us literally underwater. The backyard is completely submerged, despite the presence of ground-level drains that are supposed to alleviate this problem. I walked out barefoot into three inches of icy water on the patio to check on the drains. I reached into a sea of brown water in the vicinity of a drain to make sure it wasn't blocked. By the time I touched it, my elbow was submerged.

Spent the morning baling water off the patio like my name was Captain Ahab. I should check the real estate listing --  I thought I lived in a modest one-story ranch, not a damn whaling vessel. I won't miss doing this.

I blogged about this in a previous life, because it floods pretty much every year. Sometimes the water creeps over the patio and floods the dining room. I always get secretly angry at people when they wax poetic about how wonderful it was to sleep while listening to rain. I'm never bundled cozily in bed when it rains -- I'm sitting by the back door keeping a damn candlelight vigil against the destruction of our house. Having recently put down "wood" flooring to replace the ruined carpet, I can only assume, with our luck, it will flood again. What can I say? My life is like that.

I've put off writing for awhile because every time I try to describe what's going on at the current moment, I am sucked into a whirlpool of bitterness and anger that would put a Shakespearean villain to shame. Disposing of your childhood literary best friends and family-built furniture will do that to you. Some days you can't even afford your memories.

Outside, the rain wears on into hour twelve.