So we had a major rainstorm last night. As Echo and I stood on our back porch, we smiled and pointed at little rivulets making their way down the hill behind our house and into our yard.
"Good thing we didn't buy this house," I thought.
After a while, the rain started to puddle on our porch a bit and I grabbed the broom to perfunctorily brush it off. I told Echo how brooming the water reminded me of when, as a kid, my dad had broomed out rain from our lanai in our little house in Hawaii. It was during a heavy rain storm and he was about the same age I am now.
I remembered as a kid thinking at the time, "brooming out water in a rainstorm? How silly! It will never work! It just keeps coming back."
Well, the rain here in El Paso, as it did in Oahu, didn't let up.
And the rivulets turned into rivers.
Soon the whole backyard was full of water, and mud and sludge and torrents of water were coming down the hill, cascading off the rock wall that forms the edge of our property and marching in waves towards our back door.
Echo and I both picked up our brooms.
For the next hour and a half, Echo and I literally swept the water off our porch to keep it from flooding into our house. We packed towels along the edge of the concrete and dug little trenches to divert the water which had formed a river and was now pouring around the side of our house and out into the street. With every push of the broom forward, a wave of water came pushing back. Soon I was sweating and Echo had blisters from her broom handle.
Eventually the rain let up. Somehow we had managed to keep it from pooling on our porch and pouring into our house. As the water level went down and we started collecting the soaked barricade/towels for wash and reuse, Echo turned and said, "I guess your dad's brooming back in the day wasn't so silly."
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