I’d been needing to go to the post office all week, but the incessant storms were making it a nice time to sit down with a good knitting project in hand and my feet up–never mind the hearing aids, where getting wet or not is the $6400 question.
But the skies finally held their breath for a moment, Friday presented the gift of an arbitrary deadline, and at about 4:25, I finally kicked myself out the door.
Driving there, I was surprised at how high the water was in the Baylands. It would be so easy right now to repeat the February day when my oldest was 16 and, as a certified Red Cross volunteer, had helped run the emergency shelter with my husband: a friend of mine was in there, having gone to bed the night before on one side of the room and having woken up to find her waterbed on the other side now, it having become, yay verily, a water bed. Hovering near the ceiling.
I’d called my friend Lisa to let her know that folks had been evacuated from her old apartment building by boat.
There was also our friend Brad who’d wondered if the water might be coming up in the street and decided he’d better go open his front door to check–only to see his koi from his back yard right there, swimming past his feet. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
It raiiiiiiiiiined as I drove.
I got in the post office with my hood over my head, got my four packages safely on their way, I got back to the car and on down the road. There was traffic, a light, the freeway nearby that everybody seemed to be heading to or from–
–and then there was me. On a quiet, narrow road. Going past the side of the San Francisco Bay marshes, the sky thunderously dark in puffy soft clouds that made it hard to take the threat seriously, and right in front of them, suddenly, the sun! Bright, vividly shining as only the rain behind it in the late day can make it, with a strong rainbow arching across the water to land somewhere over…there, where, as I approached, a white egret, standing in the enlarged lake, had its head tucked down.
Hoping perhaps for an incoming koi for dessert.