Like the Rains of Venus

It looks like the rain is going away for a few days starting Monday. The forecast says three days with no rain. This is the third week it's either rained every day or almost every day. Some days it's rained before sunrise but been cloudy, making it hard to keep track. Sometimes, there's so much water dripping off trees it sounds like it's sprinkling, when it's not. When there's been some sun, I thought it was clearing up, but the clouds returned within hours.

Back in the 80s I read this Ray Bradbury story about a man living on Venus. The story was written before we knew what it was like there. All we knew for sure was it was very cloudy. The man in the story is going insane from the constant, torrential rain and incessant dripping. It never stopped. I've thought of that story more than once. I'm not a Ray Bradbury fan, but I still remember that one.

In winter, tree limbs break when ice piles up on them. Some have been breaking now, because of the water weight. There hasn't been enough time for them to dry out, and eventually they crack. Kind of like the man in the story. Trees have been falling, because the ground is saturated and has softened. Sometimes I'll hear something fall and wonder whether it was a limb close by or a tree farther away. I think it's trees.

Yesterday, I was caught in flash flood conditions on the road. In one place there was a hole in asphalt where water was gushing up onto the road. It was outside of town. I don't think there was a water line there, but who knows? It looked like runoff from the hill beside the road had pushed up under the road. The rain became too strong to see much of anything, and we had to pull over. Later, when going back that route, a crew was out where that hole was. A couple of other crews were working on power lines. I saw where a mudslide had crossed the road. That was kind of weird. The hill next to it was only partially collapsed. There was grass in vertical strips separated by strips of bare earth. Past that the Chattahoochee River had overrun its banks flooding fields. I saw a house by the river with water all around it and a low-lying road with water flowing across it, cutting people off from their homes.

When I started on this blog, the sun was out. It looked like no more rain for today. Then the thunder started. It's raining again.

Have a great, dry weekend.