Well dark clouds are rollin' in
Man I'm standin' out in the rain
Well dark clouds are rollin' in
Man I'm standin' out in the rain
Yeah flood water keep a rollin'
Man it's about to drive poor me insane-Stevie Ray Vaughan
Mother Nature. Yikes!
So, the front room of our house flooded last week, and we are still in cleanup mode. What a mess. The aftermath caused us to sort through some of our family memorabilia to determine what could be salvaged, adding to the emotional aspects of the event. Here is what happened.
A week ago Thursday, my husband had a doctor's appointment 50 miles from the small, remote mountain town we live in in northern New Mexico. We weren't sure how long this would take, so we arranged for a good friend (Pam) to check on the dogs while we were away. She came over about 15 minutes before we were scheduled to leave. We also had someone here doing work on the house (his name is Ever).
When my friend arrived, it was raining. During summer, New Mexico experiences monsoons, which result in usually brief but heavy rainstorms.
What is the monsoon?
The monsoon is a seasonal change in wind direction. Most of the year, New Mexico and the Southwest experience a dry westerly wind, with occasional storm systems. However, during the summer months, winds become more southerly, drawing up moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. This change in wind pattern brings increased rainfall and storms to the Southwestern United States, including New Mexico.
This storm had the heaviest rainfall I have ever seen. Pouring doesn't even come close. It rained so hard that our front porch (called a portal in New Mexico) became a 4-inch pool of water, which started pouring under the front door and into the living room. Luckily, we owned a wet vac, and Pam began to vacuum up the water. It was coming in too fast to make a difference, so my husband and I, along with the guy working on our house went outside to begin bailing the water from the portal. Imagine the three of us with buckets and shovels gathering the water and walking down the road to dump it. We couldn't empty where we were because the water would flow back onto the porch. The flour of us spent hours bailing and vacuuming up water.
We were able to move some, but not all, of the furniture from the front room to safety. We were left with a soggy rug, soaked furniture (the pieces we couldn't move), and a wet, muddy, dirty floor. The water went under the shelves in a closet, so we had to have them pulled out to dry. We have had open windows, fans blowing, rugs pulled up, and furniture on its side for days, all in an effort to dry everything out. There is a 6-inch watermark along the outside front of the house, demarking the height of the flood. Honestly, it is a mess.
But it could have been so much worse. We have nightmares thinking about what would have happened if the flood had started an hour later. Pam would not have been there, Ever would have finished, and we would be 50 miles away. ( We canceled the doctor's appointment) The entire house may have flooded with no one home but the dogs. Or, if it had been just the two of us, we could have never kept up with the heavy water flow. I will be forever grateful to Pam and Ever for jumping in to help. They didn't have to, and it was really hard work! Much love to you two!
Oh, and here's the kicker. Literally, two weeks ago, we finished a months-long remodeling project. We painted the entire interior of our house, added baseboard tiles, and remodeled the living room. AND IT FLOODED! Another friend, Tammy, did the work. She rushed over first thing Friday morning and spent the day tearing out and rebuilding shelves, moving furniture and rugs, and generally helping with the cleanup. I have so many truly great friends!
This week's post is short and sweet because I needed to focus on operation cleanup. However, the situation has given me some ideas for future topics for Leaving Middle Age. For example, we have an old steamer trunk in the living room filled with family mementos and keepsakes. Newspapers from the 1930s and 40s with headlines announcing wars starting and ending, presidential elections, world events, etc., high school yearbooks, and family photos from so long ago that we don't even know who the people are. Sports memorabilia, birth, and death certificates dating back to 1850. So many items that have been stored away for years. The trunk's base got soaked in the flood, so we needed to empty it to see what was lost and what could be salvaged. As I was sorting through the trunk's contents, it struck me. Why am I keeping this stuff? To what end? I want to explore this topic in greater detail and ask all of you...how you decide what and how to clear the accumulation of many lifetimes.
I also want to explore the word "fortitude" in future stories. Do you have the same strength and fortitude to deal with problems now as you did when you were younger? The same amount of patience? If so, how? If not, why?
And, have issues and struggles with ongoing household maintenance caused you to reexamine your living situation? If you live in a house, do you plan to stay there? Downsize to something smaller? Consider a 55+ community or assisted living situation? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
As I said earlier, this flood has opened the "floodgates" (groan with me!) for many topics of consideration. For now, I am going back to damage control. Wish me luck!
Have a good week!
Diane
Oh, and this is a brief follow-up to last week's post, The Third Act. I received so many suggestions for naming the 66—to 80-year-old group via social media and direct messages. Thank you! I am going to create a list of the ideas on the sidebar of this Substack. Please keep the ideas coming. We will explore and discuss them in future articles.
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We had this very same issue happen at our house during a very hard rain 2 years ago. As our portal was flooding, a woman drove her car over the rocks in front of our house and came within inches of our adobe wall. It was raining so hard, she couldn't see to take the turn. We came within I'd say an inch of the inside of our house flooding but we actually managed to do enough bailing of water to keep it level before the rain stopped. Thank goodness we had so many buckets.
I experienced a workplace flood many years ago as well, and cleaning that up is intense because it did soak the entire inside like what happened to you--I know how hard it is to do that kind of cleanup, and am very sorry you are going through this.
My workplace flooded right after Katrina, and it made me appreciate their situation in New Orleans much more clearly, as our flood was a fraction of what they experienced, and we were still very overwhelmed by the complexity of the cleaning--and trying to remove soaked rugs etc is not easy!
Good luck.
At our house, after our near flood, we ended up regrading the yard dramatically. That storm that flooded your place was our first test since we did the regrade. We had a few weak areas, but overall it worked and now we know what to tweak. We both own old adobe houses, I think they sink a bit with time.
Wow- I am so sorry!!
Your story brought back my own flood memory 30 years ago. My basement flooded (3 feet of water!) and I was storing many boxes of old books and other items belonging to my mother. She was living in South America for a year and would return in a few months. She treasured them. The clean up was horrendous but the angst of informing my mother of this loss was worse. There were other issues surrounding her lifestyle and me and my sisters having to help her pack, store her things and move her in and out if places for years. My mother died in 2012 and my sister is still sorting though her boxes.
I VOWED to never expect my sons to have to deal with my stuff before or after I died