Flooding

I'm up in the night because the heavy rain is filling the buckets in Jenny's stairwell and it has to be emptied every half hour. I went to bed at nine and at 10:30 when she went to work she woke me up to tell me that she'd had to empty the buckets 3 times in the last hour. I checked 20 minutes later and one bucket was within 2 inches of the top. I emptied it again a half hour later but the rain seems to have calmed down some. She also put a bucket in the closet which is leaking again--anyone have tar to patch around the chimney again? I guess I should check that one, too, before I go back to bed.

Did I ever tell you about the "dip" that ran past our house in Prineville? Every so often we would get heavy rains in the early spring and we'd get a pretty good stream of water running down the dip. Our driveway had a bridge over the dip and even though there had been no flood for several years we didn't remove the bridge. Then one day it happened. The water came rushing through and the bridge began acting as a dam so the water was getting close to the house. It washed around the bridge so that we couldn't drive over it and Daddy jacked it up on one end so the water could run on down the ditch. We couldn't even go to play at Jimmy's because he lived on the other side of the dip.

When the water receded somewhat, we found a fish in the water--we never did find out where it came from or how it got in flood waters but it had a wire worm all the way through it. We took it to the County Agent (we thought he knew everything) and he said he'd never seen anything like it. But he pulled out the books and classified everything for us.

Daddy rebuilt the bridge and there was no more water for 4 or 5 years. Meantime people bought property down stream from us and filled in the dip and built houses close to where it had been. Their driveways had no bridges. One morning Dan got up to do his paper route and found water coming down the dip. It was flooding everywhere. He began knocking on doors and warning people all up and down the dip. The flooding was so bad because the dip had been filled in that a tractor had to come and dig a trench so the water could run on past to the open fields below. The newspaper was delighted that one of their carriers was such a hero and took pictures and put him on the front page--and that was a Portland paper.

Every time the dip flooded We kids would build rafts and play Tom Sawyer. We managed to get wet a few times and didn't play there until the worst of the flooding was over (the run off only lasted a week or so at most) but that dip was our favorite playground. In the summer we built huge "cities" with airports and parks and schools. We'd run a hose and make rivers and boat docks all for real in our huge sandbox. We built everything from left over lumber scraps from our Dad's building business. Who needed toys from the store? And we'd roll down the grassy banks into the sand at the bottom. Sometimes in our 50 gallon barrel that had both ends cut out. That was our favorite toy for years.

So every time it rains and we get a little minor flooding here it reminds me of all the fun we had in the dip.

Would someone like to come and mend my roof??