Thursday Thunders

The pic is in honor of my Aussie friend who's been let down once again by the powers that be at good ol' Promptel. May she get internet service soon!

It's raining here. Supposed to rain all day. I kind of like rain as long as I don't have to drive in it. I like the way it smells. I like the sound of it on the roof. I like the way is sounds on the wind.

When I was a kid, one of the places we lived was on the side of a hill...literally. The yard of the house "next door" was level with our roof. Our yard was level with the roof of the house below us. When my father needed to repair our roof, he went up to the yard next door with a plank and used that as a bridge from that yard to our roof.

The weather there was mostly hot and dry. It was desert scrub--some mesquite, some cactus. Rain was sparse. Snow was even more so. And in the few short months we lived in that house we had both. The snow I wrote about at Christmas time. This time I'll tell you about the rain.

When my father bought that house it wasn't quite "finished". It was a concrete block three bedroom house. The kitchen was small, but we had a dining room to eat in and trust me that was quite a novelty for us. The house before this one was a tiny trailer attached to a concrete block building used by the church for Sunday School classes. As you can imagine there were real privacy issues.

Anyway, when Mom and Dad first used the sinks and tub, they made a discovery. There was no plumbing. The pipes didn't go anywhere. So Dad added some lengths of pipe so that they drained outside into the garden, thereby serving two purposes. The kitchen sink drained out near the back door where we had a giant four o'clock growing.

That part of Arizona is occasionally blessed with the remnants of a tropical storm or hurricane. That's what happened this particular time. The tropical storm moved over our area and rained. It wasn't some gentle little drizzle that would gradually soak into the dry ground. Nope. This was a rip, roaring rainstorm that poured down like Noah's flood.

The water just rolled down the mountain. When it made it to the edge of the yard above us, it flowed over the side like Niagara Falls. Of course there wasn't anywhere for that much water to go so it just flowed right under the doors and kept coming. Eventually the better part of it rolled on around the other side of the house and poured down on the house below us.

It took us a while to get the water in the house cleaned out. Dad had to run a garden hose through our drain pipes to wash the sand and mud away. And three days later, the yard was as dry as a desert again.

What I remember the most about that storm is the clean up. When the floors were finally dry, Mom put a coat of paste wax on them and then gave all of us kids rags. We'd stand on the rags and twist around polishing the floor. So way before some fellow name Chubby Checker was doing the twist--we thought of it first.

Anny

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