I’ve been telling Mom and Dad for years that rain and storms are dangerous, but they wouldn’t believe me. They think they know better, just because I’m a dog. Whenever I felt the atmosphere begin to change (and like most dogs, I can sense that well before the first raindrop appears), I’d whine, shake and pace anxiously to warn them of the impending danger. When that didn’t work, I’d jump up on the couch next to them, or even on the table if that’s where they were sitting, in an effort to get their attention. All that got me was a sharp, “Get down!” while they pushed me off.
Even when the storms actually hit, they’d pretend everything was okay. It could be pouring rain outside, with the sky lit up with lightening and deafening booms of thunder, and Mom and Dad would basically just go about their business, ignoring it all. Even worse, they wanted ME to ignore it! “You’ll be fine, Finn,” they’d say. “It’s nothing but a little rain and thunder.” Now I know that my parents are mostly smart people, but when it comes to bad weather, they have absolutely no clue.
So I have to admit that I feel just a little bit vindicated after the past week. We had THREE bad storms in the past seven days, and all of them resulted in some rather serious flooding in our area. Unlike many others, our house escaped damage, so we were lucky. But our driveway turned into a raging river with several inches of rain pouring down it, and we even had white caps where it meets the street. Trash cans floated by and disappeared behind a neighbor’s house, and all the while the water crept closer and closer to us.
Mom says we’re lucky that our house sits up high, but even that didn’t help last night, when fifty-mile an hour winds drove the rain right against our house and the upstairs bathroom window started leaking all over the floor. Mom seemed very unhappy about that, but not nearly as unhappy as she was later, when Dad used her best towels to stuff into the window to keep more water from coming in. And today there are many streets in our neighborhood that are still closed because of the flooding damage and the trees that blew down in the high winds.
“See?” I want to tell my parents. “I was right! Storms are VERY dangerous!” I’d like to believe that when the next storm comes, they’ll be a bit more sympathetic to my fear. And then maybe they’ll join me when I take precautionary measures, like going to high ground in case of flooding. (The dining room table is ideal for that, and there’s room for all three of us on it.) I know perfectly well that being frightened out of your wits and trying to find a safe place is the only logical response to bad weather, and maybe, just maybe, Mom and Dad have figured that out now too.
But I guess only time will tell if they’ll react appropriately when the next storm hits. And the one thing that all of us agree on is that we don’t want the chance to find that out for a long, long time.
Love, Finn
At first it was sort of fun to stand on our front porch and watch the rain come down, once we were sure it was safe to do so. But then we noticed that the water was steadily rising, and that some of the neighbor’s recycling bins were floating down the street. Soon the water was up to the hubcap’s of my daughter’s car, which was parked in front of our house. Our drive-way looked like a river, and we watched, fascinated, as several plastic drainage pipes floated down our driveway, followed by small branches and what looked like an Amazon Prime package. As my one-year old grandson so eloquently put it, “Oh, no!”
Muddling Through My Middle Age 