Thursday, January 06, 2005

waters

In the few days of January, Indianapolis has gotten almost six inches of rain. With almost a foot of snow that melted over the last couple of days of December, the city is awash with water looking for places to drain.

The sump pump under my house has come alive, whirling about once every 45 seconds or so. The small ditches that runs parallel to the road along most front yards in the townlet are now small flowing streams, if not widening ponds.

Driving in hard rain, as most of my commutes to work and back have been this week, is not fun. But there is something almost mesmerizing in watching water define the roll of the landscape, finding, searching, pushing towards lower, easier points to move on, to the creek, to the river, and beyond.

Most of the week, Franklin and I have walked on a thin layer of water in the yard, making his morning constitutional a great chore as cold water pelts us. The morning smells must be diminished in the rain. Certainly, the cold water bothers him. I coax him outside and hope that he will concentrate so that we can get back inside.

This morning, we got to take a walk, staying on the road. Yards and ditches are muddy and wet. As long as we can make our circuit before the Township school bus comes roaring through, we are ok. This morning we walked in almost total quiet. I heard the cranking thrust of the bus as we returned, walking up our drive.

One of the neighbors I usually see in the morning walked past as I took garbage out to our trash cans. He and his dog Emma, a small sheltie, usually walk to a corner of the townlet that is a townlet owned park, a path through a patch of woods. There is much water there now, and so they were taking the circuit that Franklin and I take on the road. Of course, Emma, a wonderfully proud and beautiful dog, does not need a leash. She walks with her owner, returning back to him often as the move on by. Terriers, alas, cannot do that.

The sky is quite gray but there is no rain this morning. Many folk further north of the city are suffering from ice storms and loss of electricity, the blood of our civilization. Others are dealing with flooded homes, particularly in the south part of the city.

One feels compelled to asterick any comments about rain and water to say that, of course, in comparison to those devastated by the tsunami, a heavy midwestern rain is not much, and so it isn't. But that is the news from our small part of the world this morning.


1 comment:

lemming said...

Are you part of the boil order?

I agree, it is eerie to have flooding of our own with the tsunami in the news.