Hard Rain.
Does it cleanse? Does it cause more damage than it takes care of by providing plants and animals with plenty of pure freshwater? Does it flood and cause disease, famine and even death? Water coming down from the sky is almost an allegory for life itself. Not truly predictable, yet kind of manageable in advance, but not always. Kind of wonderfully cool and cleansing but burning pain if it arrives in over-supply, just like life. Rain is headed this way. Hard rain. Rain that will cleanse, obscure, flood and cause disruption at the very least.
How does one prepare for the result when the result is not truly predictable? And are we not back to considering life itself? How do we prepare for the future when we have so little idea of what that future might bring? We prepare for everything, and then the doorbell rings and a key person in life has died, or been elected, or gotten rich or terribly poor. That damned doorbell of life! Hard rain. We welcome its arrival, but we wait to see whether or not we should have dreaded it.
There’s a house on a river not twenty miles down Highway 50 from where I live. The river floods all the time in spring and fall. The water comes up over the bank where this house is situated, and usually lays down about two feet of water in the first floor spaces of the house. The people who own the property live there all year around. They don’t move. They accommodate times of flood by moving everything upstairs, including the generator. They are well stocked with food, and just about everything else. The water comes up and they move up. The water comes down and they move down, to clean up and prepare for the next flood. They seem to much love and enjoy their relationship with the water coming down and the river itself.
I asked them if they would consider moving to somewhere not so flood-prone. They just looked back at me like I was an idiot. I don’t live in their world.
Hard rain.
Interesting.
We have many “neighbors” who live along a frequently flooded River. They seem to have the same attitude.
We were fortunate to have our home on the bluff overlooking the river.
Made sense when we wanted to be “on the River”.
‘The same strange mentality seems to exist with Coastal property owners subject to Hurricanes.
Maybe because they are guaranteed compensation?