Since our first summer interning in Texas during the summer of 2000 I have referred to hard rains as “Texas rain” to emphasize the huge quantity of water that can be spontaneously dumped from the sky. It was amazing to a Utah girl born and raised in the desert mountains. I think by the end of my time here in Singapore I may have edited my phrase to “Singapore rain.”
Every day I have to pick up Ben from the school. It’s a 4 minute walk door to door so I push a stroller or let the little kids ride bikes to go get him. The majority of days the weather is good. I suppose by good I simply mean not rainy, because I don’t actually consider miserable hot and humid to be “good” weather. In any case, yesterday it stormed really hard at about 2:30. It was a decent sized dumping and though the skies didn’t clear up to a pretty blue color they no longer looked threatening to me. When the alarm on my phone went off to leave for the school at 2:45 I grabbed Jake from his nap and laid him gently in the stroller for our daily walk.
We rushed down to the far end of campus to return the library books I had from the High School library and came back to get Ben. He was ready right on time in the lobby at 3:00 and we stopped to try to arrange a play date with a neighbor. We talked about two minutes and it began to rain. I don’t think the term “sprinkle” exists here. I haven’t seen it happen yet anyway. It started as sort of a normal to medium drop sized rain and I took off for home. About one minute of walking and I started running with the stroller. By the time I hit the school gate I was soaked to the skin and the guard yelled to me that next time I should bring my umbrella for the kids to hold. I just laughed. Too late now. Time to sprint with all I have in me to get these poor kids home!
Rounding the corner to our street I was splashing in massive puddles and the roads had spontaneously turned into rivers. Maddie had begun crying about how wet she was getting. I had so much water running down my face I couldn’t see through the water in my eyes. Harder and harder it came. I had to start wiping my face to see where I was going. It was unreal. I had so much water coming down on my head that I literally had the sensation that my head was breaking the surface of the water in a swimming pool coming up for a breath of air each time I tried to wipe the water off my face. Still it only yielded the tiniest bit of relief from the torrent of water. It was the only way I could even get a breath of air. How wild is that? Rain so heavy you have to shield your nose to take a breath of air!!
By the time I got to the house it had lightened up to more of a Texas sized rain event. You know, the standard by which I used to measure rain until we moved here.
And who was parked waiting for me at the house? The guy who picks up our cars and takes them for oil changes (I know, we live the sweet life – no more Jiffy Lube for us). He looked surprised by the sight I must have been and just smiled at us. He wisely waited until I had opened the gate so he could drive into our covered carport before getting out of our car to return the keys and I grabbed an umbrella to walk him back to the road to get in the car he would drive home.
No comments:
Post a Comment