It's about 53 degrees and raining. And it's the 26th of July.
Two weeks ago it was humid and 90 degrees.
Summer in the Northwoods was hot and sunny.
This year it came on a Thursday.
It was quite the day.
The rain outside nudges a memory and the Elixir of Knowledge picks it up and politely dusts it off for me.
Yeah.
That was quite the evening.
It was about 8 years ago.
Katrina had just ravaged the Gulf Coast and its left-overs had meandered over the country, sprouting some unique weather.
The night being remembered saw our little town hit with a rain storm.
Four inches of rain in an hour.
Since the Little-House-On-The-Corner sits next to the 1/4-block sized, asphalt parking lot of the Laundromat & Dry Cleaners, their 4 inches of rain an hour became our 4 inches of rain an hour.
I knew we were in trouble when the garden filled up, leaving small islands of broccoli tops and tomato plants.
Uh-oh.
I went outside in a t-shirt and shorts.
The rain was falling pretty hard.
Like a Hollywood street scene before the drive-by shooting.
The water in the yard was 1/2 way up my ankles.
Ohhhhh, boy.
I looked back at the house.
It's a little house that was built in the '40's.
On a slab.
No basement.
And the water was creeping up toward the threshold of the back door.
Another foot or less and the kitchen becomes a Slip'N'Slide.
The Wife pokes her head out the back door and sees what I see.
"Quick! Get in here and help me!"
Once inside, she tosses me a pillow case.
"Hold that open while I fill it!"
I'm still trying to blink the water out of my eyes.
When I do I see her pouring kitty litter between my hands.
"Wha...?"
"We don't have any sand -
hold still!"
I hoped there were no cat "nuggets" in the kitty litter.
Then I remembered.
We don't have a cat.
And TechnoBoy, now 9 yrs old, was well down the whole potty-training trail. Soooooo...
Oh.
Yeah.
We were going to throw out some old paint and the landfill wanted it mixed with cat litter first.
The Lord knows what ya need when ya need it, eh?
Eight pillow cases later, the back door looks like a foxhole in a John Wayne movie.
I occasionally bailed the landing with a cottage cheese container when the seepage got a little troubling.
At least we could keep up and keep the water away from the door.
The kitty litter bags held, the flood was stalemated, and the rain stopped about 20 minutes later.
Huh.
Now I'm 8 yrs removed from that night.
Another pull of the Elixir in a warm, dry kitchen brings back a sobering thought.
A thought that's remembered from 8 yrs ago.
It hit me just before I fell asleep that night in a warm, dry bed in a dry, safe house.
There were people way south of us that had no home to go to, no dry place to stay.
Katrina had leveled or flooded their homes.
And their lives.
I'm remembering that thought here in the kitchen.
Huh.
Sometimes I think He allows things to happen to me so I'm more aware of what other folks are going through.
So that I care.
Really care.
And maybe understand, at least a little bit, what they are going through.
"To weep with those who weep."
Huh.
Like rain, tears are pretty wet, too.