Rain, Rain, Go Away ...

Photo: hurley_gurlie182, from morguefile.com.

We're right in the middle of a storm. Thunder, lightning, heavy rain. I hate it and so do the dogs. Quila is running around barking wildly at every crack of thunder and flash of lightning, Chi is beside me quivering underneath the desk, and Tony ... ? He's sitting at his computer, cool as a cucumber, telling us not to stress.

I'm not scared of storms like the dogs. I just hate storms because we live in this house.

The first time there was a huge storm here, we were out. We came home to find water streaming downs the walls of the back living room and down the back door. We had just had the roof replaced so we called in the roofers who told us that water had banked up behind the leaves in the valleys and the gutter guard and, with nowhere to go, just poured in through the house. We now have a yearly booking with a company to clean our gutters and the valleys in our steep roof.

Another feature of this house was the bubbling spring that would gush up in the back living room. A friendly builder installed an ag drain and we've had no spring in the back room since. There was one occasion though where we thought the water might have been diverted into the spare room off our bedroom.

It's this spare room that makes me apprehensive every time it storms. The previous owner-builder concreted down the side of the house and sloped the concrete towards the house. No matter how clean we keep the patio outside the spare room, whenever it rains heavily water seeps in under the doors.

The back living room is still not dry. The wood heater is rusting and, with heavy wind, we'll usually find a small patch of water on top of the heater.

Tonight has been particularly bad. The top of the heater is wet and so is the floor around it. Rivulets are flowing through the ridges of the slate to the back door. I pulled back the carpets in the spare room to dry them after last week's rain. Unhampered by the carpet, tonight's rain has flowed further ‘inland’ across the concrete slab to settle in a soggy pool in the doorway between the spare room and our bedroom.

It doesn't seem that we're the only ones affected. Our front neighbours have only just quietened down after, it sounds like, emptying buckets of water out of their back room or patio. And the sirens of a number of emergency vehicles have sounded in the past hour.

I know I should be thankful for the rain after this drought—my herbs (and the weeds) are thriving—I just wish it didn't have to come all at once!