Antediluvian

I chose both the title of this post and its beauty shot carefully.

Antediluvian. Before the Flood.

I wanted to remind myself that just a few weeks ago I had snapped a couple of shots of the flowers in our front garden because this truly has been the most beautiful spring I can remember. Abundant moisture over the winter (both snow and rain) meant that flowers were blooming with wild abandon. Roses, impatiens, irises, geraniums, day lilies, rhubarb, basil, box elders, mint, one gift marigold, and that pretty light-green sticker bush that I can never remember the name of were all jostling for space in the tiny space in front of our porch.

It was glorious, and this picture doesn't do it justice.

But then there is this, taken eight days ago from the porch just behind that garden:

And this, looking north instead of south:

Those are the same roses, the same box elders, the same irises after more than eight inches of rain in a 24-hour period.

Really, I'm not complaining. We are so very, very lucky.

There has been so much rain, and it has lasted so long, but we are still okay.

The full name of the House on the Corner is "The House on the Corner at the Bottom of the Hill and the Intersection of Two Drainage Streets." The flooded shots above were scary, as I waited to see if a downpour would push run-off from the hill and the two streets past the bottom step of the porch and into the house. (It has not, in our 31 years in this house.) But within hours the water had drained away, and left our yard damp and puddled but our house dry.

So many others in the middle section of the nation are not as lucky. We watch in horror the television footage of houses sliding into flooding rivers. We marvel that the interstate highway that passes near Small Town has been closed. Our grocery store conversations start "Is your basement okay?"

And even these are not the worst: When my text alert chimed at 1 a.m. and Boy#1 reported that they were safe after a killer tornado passed within a couple miles of their home in a neighboring state, we were thankful but horrified.

In the past few days we've finally seen the sun, after weeks of unremitting storms. We're Kansans, so we emerge pale and blinking and with our senses of humor intact.

Small Town fairgrounds, which had just begun to dry out after flooding a month ago, were inundated again and I'm sure city workers chuckled as they posted the notice:

They knew they'll be the ones cleaning the up-to-their-eaves buildings behind the sign that apologizes "Sorry. No Camping."

And yesterday, with the sun finally out, Husband decided to see if the surface pump that has kept our basement dry-ish could also drain the swamp in the front yard.

Two hours later things were looking better:

By the end of the day the left-over puddles had soaked into the saturated ground.

It's not a lawn, but it's progress.

Today we're watching the forecast again. The sun was out this morning but the forecast calls for rain to begin again at 1 p.m., and the weather guys have told us to get the cars into the garage--"storms, possibly severe" are probable in the late afternoon.

One of my favorite bloggers, who writes wisely and frankly at swistle.com, describes my mental state perfectly with her tagline: "I acknowledge my luckiness without giving up my claim to the suckiness."

We are so lucky. We are not under water, we are not cleaning up tornado debris. But I mourn my flowers, and I am so, so tired of having rain in the forecast every day.

I am ready to be postdiluvian.