Brown Water Rafting

At night you can almost convince yourself it's Willy Wonka's river of chocolate. If you can ignore the slight stench and random debris floating swiftly past, that is. An upturned beer bottle. A pizza box. One of many random orphaned sandals, still right side up, cruises westward.

Yes, the floods have returned. Worst flooding in 40 years they say. This time it's actually raining locally while the rivers been filling up from the rains to the north as well. In the last flood, it took all day to rise to less than what it did tonight in about 2-3 hours. It's still climbing slowly.

I can hear the guy next store bucketing water from the utility area behind his house. Ours seems fine for the meantime. Maybe another inch to go.

We're so far behind, that we were a bit ahead tonight. They've been crying wolf for this flood for so long now that we never removed our sand bags from the last flood.

I've spent a good deal of the evening watching the Englishman across the street. He wades out into the muck. Mesmerized like a little boy. He can't seem to stay out of it for more than 10 minutes. Finding things that don't really need to be moved, but coming up with good enough reasons to futz with them at 11:00 pm in the knee high brown water. He takes his time, exploring our new neighborhood with his halogen flashlight. Big and yellow like something off a swamp boat.

All sorts of wildlife has found it's way onto and inside of our house. Large bugs cling to the outside walls of our place. Geckos cling to the inside ones. I found this frog on our front porch. I wonder what I'd see if I licked him. Would it be anything like the brown water at Duff Gardens?