Stormy weather

It's been two crazy days of thunderstorms. My poor husband has been vacuuming water out of the basement as it has seeped in. Four people in the area have been killed. People's basements are flooding with the 4-7 inches of rain that fell in some spots, and the local downtown arts festival has been open only sporadically between cloudbursts. Another line of storms is due to cross over in the next couple of hours. Its bottom is dragging across Missouri, endangering my two sons.

As nervous as these storms make me, I'm still less nervous than I get when there's a snowstorm, probably because weather like this is what I grew up with. Nothing beats a good old Louisiana gully-washer, and each summer provided quite a few of them. We knew enough to be wary of lightning, though, and my mother was usually pretty nervous and scared during a thunderstorm. She'd gather us up in one bed while it lasted. I don't recall being worried about my father during storms, even though as a logger working in the woods, he was in a lot of danger. I can only assume that he and the crew would shelter in their trucks until the storm passed.

My spouse did finally get gas for the generator he bought some months ago. He tried it out, connecting it, via one very long extension cord, to the sump pump. To heck with the sump pump. Let's see if it will work the coffee maker! We don't lose power often, but it seems that when we do, I instantly develop a tremendous craving for coffee.

After the storm had passed, I went outside to check on the plants. A white-tailed rabbit leapt out from under my porch and ran to the side of the house. Either he's been keeping company with the black cat, or he's the one who has been under there all along. The squirrel tends to hide away under the back deck, so we're just cluttered with critters. Squirrels, rabbits, and cats I can live with. No problem. I'm just glad to not have possums hissing at me, or snakes inside my house! There ARE some good elements to living in Michigan that I neglected to mention. No bugs. Not even fleas. No ticks. No roaches. We do have ants, and they can be pesky. We have wasps, yellow jackets, hornets, and bees. For a short while during the spring, we'll have flies, the big blue bottle flies that are nearly as large as horseflies. But generally, most types of pestilence are either frozen to death during the winter or else just don't exist here. In exchange, we deal with high ozone days, e coli in the drinking water, and potholes big enough for swimming holes. (One local robin daily has a nice splash in the pothole at the corner. He seems quite happy to have such a convenient and roomy bathtub.)

The next line of storms is due to arrive within the next fifteen minutes, so I suppose I'd better end and shut down the computer. Maybe this one will be the last line of storms for the night. S.