Flood

Yesterday after we came home from church and the market, I laid down on our sisal rope couch and fell into the kind of sleep that, in my experience, is only brought on by heavy (legal) drug use or intensely oppressive heat. The kind that paralyses your body no matter how badly it wants to move but magnifies your simmering dream-thoughts into swollen, completely incoherent dialogues that leave you confused and feeling anything but rested. Since I hadn't taken anything other than a prenatal vitamin that day I managed to pull one eyelid open and focus all my energy on reading the numbers on our digital thermometer. It read one 120. (Granted, it was in sun-lit window but still…) Satisfied that my coma was simply heat induced I drifted off for a good 45 minutes and had nightmares of the rapidly approaching dry season.

When I woke up the sky was a weird shade of yellow-gray, like an old bruise that was just beginning to heal. I stumbled to the kitchen and put two oranges in the freezer, hoping they might revive us a little. When I came back into the living room a breeze suddenly blustered in the front door without warning, sending papers flying and shaking a plastic chair threateningly. Bryan and I exchanged groggily hopeful glances. Just then a sharp slice of light made us wince in the broad daylight giving us a heartbeat of warning before the ensuing crash of thunder shattered the mountain behind us. The storm that hit was one of the biggest ones we have had this year. As the rain started pelted our tin roof Bryan ran outside to zip up all the canvas windows in our tent-bedroom while I started closing our wooden windows in the house. I bolted the door behind Bryan when he came back dripping wet and like good sailors on an only partially sea-worthy vessel, we began battening down the hatches. The wind was blowing the rain horizontally from the South-east meaning water was soon pouring under our front door. I rushed to stop the water with towels but it eagerly made its way around forming a seasonally river flowing through the middle of our house. The river was fed by tributaries from the water falls under our windows and soon we stopped fighting and just resorted to moving furniture and books out of its way. When shouting over the roar of rain and wind around us was no longer helpful for actual communication we were reduced to simply laughing and taking a few pictures of what honestly felt like Poe's maelstrom. Off of the back porch our rain gutters gushed foamy white water into barrels that simply overflowed into the rushing brown water on the ground. Our tent valiantly withstood the wind put looked dejectedly wet in the storm and I dreaded finding out what all was lying ruined on the floor (it turns out, not too much). After about twenty minutes the storm turned and the rain came pouring in from the North-west. Thankfully, our back porch shields that side of the house and not as much water found its way in this time.

This morning when Aisha came to work and saw us laying wet clothes and towels out in the sun she laughed and said that everything in her house got wet too (though I suspect her "everything" really means everything and not just a lot like it means for us). She then shook her head and said, "That was a lot of rain yesterday. It's leaving now though. The dry season is very close." I thought it was interesting that a monster thunder storm seems to mean that the rain is on its way out. Apparently it wants to be remembered. I try to assure it that it will be. As much as I like keeping my rug dry, there is nothing quite like a good storm out here.