Water, water everywhere

This was my backyard on Saturday afternoon. We don't normally have lake front property. It rose higher than this on Sunday, but by then my energy for taking pictures had waned. I took the picture to show my father and mother, whom we visited on Saturday. It was a crazy thing to do and we were lucky to get home. But my brother was in town and we had spent all morning wondering if we would get water in the basement.

We decided to wonder about it from afar. My brother lives in California and at best we only see him a few times a year. When my parents move in a few months, we will see him even less. My parents live on top of a sand dune and do not get water in their house. They are on the lake. Between the end of the sand dunes and the highway, there is a ecologically significant bog. This bog, normally a wet place, spilled over the road. We muddled through and had a good visit, watching the continual rain, visiting, laughing, planning our parents move, talking about their health, etc.

It was torrential rain on the way home. Most of Friday night and Saturday it rained non-stop. Thunder showers, they called it. Not violent storms, but a heck of a lot of rain. Saturday night it was raining hard, especially at 65 miles per hour. But we were lucky to get home. 80/94 was closed just east of my parents' exit and we were headed west. By Sunday it was closed further west and I could not get out there as planned. I had to reschedule my father's appointment with his neurologist.

Our basement had a little river running through it. Not a lot of water, just enough to be an annoyance and make us sweep it into the sump pit. We spent most of Saturday morning preparing for the flooding, picking up laundry, moving cardboard boxes and relocating important stuff to higher ground. Or so we thought. When the water came in, it was a steady stream, causing us to rediscover items that could be damaged. Eventually there was very little higher ground left.

Now, we had cats for the first 12 years we lived in this house. Three of them. Elderly cats the last five years of their lives. One of them never quite did his business in the litter box, although in his younger days, he was close. We haven't had water in our basement for 10 years. Which, sadly, means the floor hasn't been washed in 10 years. Oh my, this made for a smelly situation on Sunday. Lugging stuff, sweeping the water with a push broom, discarding wet stuff. We filled four garbage cans and had lots of recycling. Most of what we lost were items we should have thrown out ten years ago but didn't. Boxes and paper bags of books, 30 year old magazines, ancient financial records. Most of the garbage we tossed wasn't even wet, it was just garbage. I'm trying to look at it all as a further opportunity to declutter. Today I filled another giant bag of garbage and a banker's box of recycling.

Unfortunately, Large has a gastro-intestinal thing as a result of the basement cleaning. We weren't totally focused on washing hands, I guess. And he didn't. He's been not eating more than a couple slices of toast for two days now.

I now am instituting a firm no cardboard rule for the basement. If it's not in plastic, it can't go down. Appliance boxes can be kept for one year, the date on the outside of the box with the receipt attached. Otherwise there is no point to keeping them. I'm in full tossing mode. Look out. When we flood in another 10 years, we will have nothing to worry about.