Memories of a mucky Father's Day!

It was Father's Day 1996 and it pouring down rain, for several days already. Robb's parents had been visiting and left to go home but couldn't because the road they wanted to travel on was flooded. They came back to our house to stay. That night, the tiny little creek which normally rested a couple hundred feet back in the woods behind our house crept up toward it. Apparently it had been raining even harder up north.

We awoke just a little while later with a phone call from one of Robb's concerned brothers who had been watching the flooding reports on tv and saw that our town was in the news. We went out on the deck and took a look at our sudden lake front property. Instead of a deck, we had a dock... It was kind of cool until you realized what kind of scum was swimming past you and how many of your neighbors were suffering because of it. Mistakenly leaving the deck door open slightly. Our golden retriever decided to go down to the yard and ran down the steps into the swirling water. Robb jumped in after her and standing waist deep in the rushing water dragged her back to the deck. He went for a tetanus shot the next day.

A view from our deck across the neighbors yards.

We weren't the only ones up for the rest of the night. Our neighbors to the north had their basement filling up with sewage. The people to the south of us had a nice big basement window overlooking their back yard and the creek had broken through. All the houses on our street with their backs to the creek got water in their basement. Ours was dry. Robb likes to think that his dad, a Methodist minister, had stood on the back deck parting the water. I prefer to think that God had led us to purchase this house that only had a small basement window on the back side, but we could both be right I guess. Water came up to within an inch of coming in the window but didn't come through.

That was where my garden was and you shouldn't even be able to see the creek from here...

The water finally went down the next day and we spent that day helping neighbors haul things out of their basements. YUCK! Bleaching down walls and scooping out creek mud. Dead fish everywhere.

a neighbors house. Check out the wet bricks. That was how high the water had been during the night...

The railroad timbers that I'd used to frame my garden were several yards down stream. They were heavy! We managed to get them back to our yard balanced on the back of our rider lawn mower. Our neighbors shed had been moved to the next yard down. Weeks later, the cherry tomato plants that I had planted in my little garden were sprouting and growing in our neighbors yards as well as mine.

Me and my boy and his armadillo, resting on the couch for just a little bit that next afternoon.

With the snow melting so fast right now, I'm seeing news on tv that reminds of this time vividly. We're expecting more rain today and the snowdrift on our patio has visibly gone down a couple feet since yesterday. Parts of our front yard are showing yucky brownish green grass. Since then, we've moved across the creek and live on a hill so the creek won't bother us at all if we get a repeat of 1996.

And for the sake of the people on the other side of the creek, we're praying, God-willing, that the creek don't rise!