After the Rains, Wordless Wednesday and Words for Wednesday

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Linking up with Wordless Wednesday and Sandee at Comedy Plus.     

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Words for Wednesday was begun by Delores and has become a moveable feast of word or picture or music prompts to encourage us to write stories, poems, or whatever strikes our fancy.    

This month, the prompts are being provided by yours truly.

The whole point is to write and have fun, so please join in, you don't even have to use the prompts if you don't want.  Let them be a springboard, not a straight jacket.

A big thanks to Elephant's Child for allowing me to provide the prompts this month.  Next month, River will be providing the prompts on her blog.     

This week the prompts are:

love

ocean

savor

detail

charge

childlike

and/or

last

broadcast

lick

system

crash

shocking

As i finished my work that Monday, May 17, i went home with no clue about what was to come.  Ms. PA had given me a strict CHARGE to get home before the rain came, but i still needed to go see Ms. S, so i did.

We're used to some stormy weather, after all, and i figured this would be like 'most every other weather SYSTEM we get coming through here:  a CRASH of lightening and a wall of rain to start, tapering off to a steady rainfall for a while, and tapering further until it stopped.

This wasn't going to be one of those, it was going to be a storm that came to town like the bad guys used to ride in thinking to LICK Matt Dillon.  Yes, Ms. S watches old Westerns on TV while i am there some days, can you tell?

For a while even after i got home, there was no rain yet, so i fixed supper and sat down to SAVOR it.  At LAST the rains came, and they were light, then heavy, then light, but not SHOCKINGLY heavy.  

Then radio began to BROADCAST the severe storm alerts that we hear so often we are in danger of becoming jaded and ignoring them.  They are almost always word for word the same, DETAIL after DETAIL.  There will be heavy rain, quarter size hail, damaging winds of up to 60mph, etc.  Watch out for flash flooding, do not drive in deep water, move to an interior room of your home, ad naseum.

As the light faded, i watched as the sky sent down buckets of rain, so much that it was pouring out of the house gutters in sheets.  Every time we thought it was slowing, it would start up again.

This went on for hours.  Every time i got up in the night, it was still coming down, an OCEAN of water that showed no signs of letting up.

At first light i took Coda out, and there was still standing water in the low-lying areas, which i knew was unusual.  Most of the time, it drains off within a couple of hours, and the rain had slacked up about 4 hours prior.

The news was grim, we'd gotten up to 13.75 inches of rain at some of the rain gauges in the area, all in about 5 hours time.

No drainage system can handle that, and ours didn't.

The skies stayed gray Tuesday, but we only got a few drizzles more.  Then it rained more on Wednesday, and even more on Thursday, and Friday saw a bit more.  No huge storms on those other days, just day after day of gray and rain, drizzle, stop, start again, rain, drizzle.

Depending on where you were, you got upward of 18 inches for the week, and this after an April that was twice as wet as usual, and an early May that was no drier.

The Wordless Wednesday photo above shows the results of such rain at only one house.  There are hundreds more like that.

When i went to work on the Monday after, Carl, his CHILDLIKE concern showing through, was talking about all the people whose homes were damaged.  "What do they do?" he asked.  We talked about how churches and charities go in and help them gut their houses and rebuild.

He has so much LOVE for people, that special needs man/child.  He is grieving with those who grieve.

We all are.

May the Lord be close to the broken-hearted.  Our church has already started sending out work crews.  It's all we can do.

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Today is:

Bob Day -- an internet holiday i couldn't confirm, but if your name is Bob, you deserve a special day just for having that name!

Crown Prince's Birthday -- Denmark

Dracula Day -- Bram Stoker's Dracula went on sale this day in 1897

Dzien Matki -- Poland (Mother's Day)

Festival of the Valley -- Ancient Egyptian Calendar (celebration of the movement of Amun from the East Bank of Thebes to the West Bank; it involved giving flowers and sharing food with the dead)

Full Flower Moon / Corn Planting Moon / Milk Moon

     Buddha Day/Vesak/Waisak  -- Bhuddist's Buddha Day; date varies with many celebrating tomorrow, and some areas already started the celebrations yesterday; sometimes called "Buddha's Birthday"

     Heavenly Sage Bao Sheng’s Birthday -- Taoism

     Kasone Full Moon -- Myanmar

     Vesak Full Moon Poya Day -- Sri Lanka

     Waisak/Vesak Festival -- Borobudur Temple, Java, Indonesia (on the day of the full moon, a stunning and spiritual celebration of Buddha's birthday)

Goblin Races -- Fairy Calendar

Holiday of the Receiving of Ra -- Ancient Egyptian Calendar (date approximate)

Independence Day -- Georgia(1918); Guyana(1966)

National Blueberry Cheesecake Day

National Cherry Dessert Day

National Day of Healing -- Australia (formerly called National Sorry Day; to express regret for the ill treatment of Aboriginal Peoples of Australia)

National Paper Airplane Day -- not an official holiday, but go make one, and have a blast; some people even organize contests

National Senior Health and Fitness Day -- US (don't let age get in the way of staying healthy! this year the theme is "Life is Better in Motion") 

Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole Day -- Hawai'i

Sally Ride Day -- US (birth anniversary of America's first woman in space)

St. Augustine of Canterbury's Day (First Archbishop of Canterbury and Patron of England; feast day in the Anglican Communion and most Eastern Churches)

St. Philip Neri's Day (Patron of Gravina, Manfredonia-Vieste-San Giovanni Rotondo, and Rome, Italy; the United States Army Special Forces)

Thargelia -- Ancient Greek Calendar (birthday festival of Apollo and Artemis; through tomorrow, date approximate)

World Lindy Hop Day -- Frankie Manning's birth anniversary    

Anniversaries Today:

Boston University is founded by the Massachusetts legislature, 1869

Birthdays Today:

Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, 1968

Helena Bonham Carter, 1966

Lenny Kravitz, 1964

Genie Francis, 1962

Sally Ride, 1951

Pam Grier, 1949

Philip Michael Thomas, 1949

Hank Williams, Jr., 1949

Stevie Nicks, 1948

Brent Musburger, 1939

Miles Davis, 1926

James Arness, 1923

Peggy Lee, 1920

Jay Silverheels, 1919

Frankie Manning, 1914

Peter Cushing, 1913

Robert Morley, 1908

John Wayne, 1907

Dorothea Lange, 1895

Al Jolson, 1886

Today in History:

Armenian rebels battle the Sassanid empire and win the right to openly practice Christianity, 451

An earthquake  strikes Kamakura, Japan, killing about 30,000, 1293

Geneva  expels John Calvin and his followers from the city, 1538

Alse Young becomes the first person executed as a witch in the American colonies, 1647

Lewis and Clark first see the Rocky Mountains, 1805

The Indian Removal Act is passed by the U.S. Congress, 1830

Dred Scott is emancipated by the Blow family, his original owners, 1857

The impeachment trial of U.S. President Andrew Johnson ends with Johnson being found not guilty by one vote, 1868

Nicholas II becomes Tsar of Russia, 1894

Charles Dow publishes the first edition of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, 1896

The first major commercial oil strike in the Middle East is made, 1908

The world's longest-lasting tornado, lasting for over 7 hours and traveling 293 miles, strikes Mattoon, Illinois, 1917

British Guiana gains independence, becoming Guyana, 1966

Apollo 10 returns to Earth after a successful eight-day test of all the components needed for the forthcoming first manned moon landing, 1969

The Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 becomes the first commercial transport to exceed Mach 2, 1970

Willandra National Park is established in Australia, 1972

George Willig climbs the South Tower of New York City's World Trade Center, 1977

A 7.7 magnitude earthquake strikes Japan, triggering a tsunami that kills at least 104 people, injures thousands. Many people go missing and thousands of buildings are destroyed, 1983

The European Community adopts the European flag, 1986

Zviad Gamsakhurdia becomes the first democratically elected President of the Republic of Georgia in the post-Soviet era, 1991

The Supreme Court of the United States rules that Ellis Island, the historic gateway for millions of immigrants, is mainly in the state of New Jersey, not New York, 1998

Sherpa Lakpa Gelu climbs Mount Everest in 10 hours 56 minutes, 2003

The New York Times publishes an admission of journalistic failings, claiming that its flawed reporting and lack of skepticism towards sources during the build-up to the 2003 war in Iraq helped promote the belief that Iraq possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, 2004

The May 2006 Java earthquake kills over 6,600 people, leaves 200,000 homeless, 2006*

The World Health Organization confirms that Ebola has reached Sierra Leone, 2014

Hackers steal personal data for about 100,000 taxpayers after breaking into a U.S. Internal Revenue Service system that allows taxpayers to retrieve previous tax returns; the data can be used to file tax refund claims and commit identity theft, 2015

Ken Wyatt becomes Australia's first Aboriginal minister in government as the minister for indigenous Australians, 2019

*Occurred 22:54 GMT May 26, 05:54 Local Time May 27, so some sources date it today, some tomorrow