Wednesday it poured. In buckets. We even let the neighbor’s two dogs (who have adopted us) inside our house for the first time ever because with the wind blowing the rain in from the west, they were shivering out on our covered front porch.
The rain thrashed against the corrugated tin roofs. It turned the dirt roads to mud. Otherwise dry indentations within them became rivulets of flowing brown water.
And with that the river rose. And the river joined, for the first time in six months, the sea. Sweeping its banks and earlier-dry gullies clean of plastic bags and shoes and bottles, and depositing them on to the beach.
The forest is green now. Last week it was brown.
And for minutes at a time the air now feels light and fresh and almost cold. Two weeks ago we were all in agony over the heat.
And for the first time in three years our house hasn’t flooded with the first big rain. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed but we’re thinking all of our flood mitigation projects of the past two years may just have worked.
