On Wednesday last week, I looked out the window and was shocked by the sun. Bright sun, strong shadows. It had been five days since I’d seen the sky.
We’d gotten rain. We got a heckuvalot of rain, to the point where I drew up a list of things we’d need to take with us in an evacuation, beginning with three cats and ending with details like my son’s medication and a stuffed animal for each child, plus how to store our photo albums and other incidentals.
This is the road about 50 feet past my house:
This is the road fifty feet beyond that:
Nice, huh? We had enough rain that I dug trenches away from the side of my house, and I built a little brick wall to curve the water in the curb out into the street rather than having it run down our driveway:
(Don’t laugh. Pathetic as that may be, it worked.)
That tiny brook running through the back of our property, the one good only for breeding mosquitos? Went from four feet wide to about forty, and it engulfed the path at its side.
In fact, it brought the water up to about twenty feet from the house. Remember last fall when I told you about the tree they’re going to take down? It’s normally twenty-five to thirty feet from the water. Well, now it’s made friends with the brook.
BEFORE
AFTER
Our mailman told my Patient Husband that he’s done this route for twenty years and never seen it this bad.
On Monday, with two days of rain left to fall, I was praying for mercy. The Hebrew word for mercy is the same as the Hebrew word for rain (Ruhamah) but this time, I was praying for mercy from the rain. It stopped raining on Wednesday and on Saturday, the water level behind our house was still rising as everything drained into the brook.
May God have mercy. But maybe, just a bit, hold off a little on more rain? Please, for now?
Welcome to Texas, nice bricks 🙂
Do Texans make epic kludges with bricks? It was an act of desperation because parts of my driveway had six inches of standing water already.
Wow! (Can you ship some of it our way? Looking at another year of no outside watering — ten years ago that was rare.)
I thought the trench was a good idea. Texas about drowned back in the fall – very weird. We’ve had more rain and snow this season than I remember in my life. (Can’t complain, given we’re prone to droughts and burn bans.)
Hi! I found your blog through My OB Said What!??!
I’m curious about the connection between mercy and rain, because the root letters of the Hebrew word for rain are “g-sh-m” while the root letters for mercy are “r-kh-m” (from which the word rukhama stems.)
I’m a religious Jew, so I find the thread of Judaism running through your blog interesting. How did that come to be?
Anyway, very nice blog! I think I’ll be sticking around. 🙂
I dual-majored in English and Religion in college, with my emphasis on Judaism, and Ivy’s been educating me too. 🙂
It was Dr. Gary Rendsburg who pointed out the Mercy/Rain connection. I’m not sure if it’s an archaic form of the word, but it’s explicit in the beginning of the book of Hosea where God says to name the child Lo-Ruhamah, and it’s a pun. No mercy,no rain. Because in pre-Israelite thought, if the gods were angry with you, they withheld the rain. Hence mercy = rain.
Oh,and welcome. 🙂
It’s probably a correlation in the meaning, but the words are different. Like, since rain is closely connected with the attribute for mercy, one might use the words interchangeably. But yeah, only in a poetic/biblical/archaic way.
Thanks for the welcome! 😀
I went to Emily’s page, and I was surprised to realize that I had seen it before. I can’t figure out how I got to it. It was several months ago. Interesting.