Bone dry

Friday afternoon I finally got to check our storage space - located about a mile from my office between the office and my old apartment. During the week it had gradually occurred to me that - even though our space is up on a hill overlooking the Ohio River - the flash flood rains Tuesday morning could have overwhelmed the storage space complex drainage system and still flooded the insides. Among other things the boxes with all of the files for the research for my dissertation - which I had hoped vaguely to turn into a book still - were there. I belatedly wondered if we should have checked to find out if the pallet factory located next to Stephanie's school sold the pallets. I got more nervous Friday morning when I couldn't reach the staff. But when I stopped there at lunchtime one of the staffpeople said she had heard no complaints - even though the street approaching the complex had flooded Tuesday and she couldn't get in to work there until 1 p.m. When I opened the space, everything looked dry and the same as usual (if dusty) - although I noticed a sewage smell throughout the whole complex. So it seemed that we had escaped the great flash floods of August more or less unscathed. Not so some of our friends. The basement of the church friends' house where we had all had dinner after coming back from Guatemala in Aptil had flooded. A friend from work - like me 10 years before - had driven her car into the flood, between our church and the office. Not only had the flood totaled her car, it had ruined a bunch of work and personal files she had carried in her car trunk (also sounds familiar, in general). For the third week in a row, it rained heavily again this Tuesday in Kentuckiana, where flooding threatened downtown New Albany again. We probably need to lay off the rain for a while.

Incidentally, pictured above is one of TWO storage spaces we currently maintain, the other - larger - in Tallahassee. Storage spaces for me goes back to Albany, NY, and I've also had - or we've had - and I've even hung out a little - at spaces in Westerville (OH), Sarasota, Bradenton, and Woodbury (MN). Among recent places to live, only in Macomb (IL) - where rents were cheap and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment by myself - and, briefly, in Louisville - in a ditto situation - did I not have a space. Love those storage spaces.

-- Perry