Fay Rained.

OK.

It really, really rained.

Buffalo Creek flooded the entirety of Latham Park, and then some, such that houses had water certainly, certainly in them. We picked up several inches between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., and the storm drains down there could not I guess handle it, and we ourselves, up here, uphill, got up this morning to water all over our kitchen table and dripping out of the light fixture above said table and we thought we had it bad, and I was thinking, this seems out of line, really, but then on the way in to work we saw water up against and surely inside those people's houses down Wendover on Latham Road, and we saw 70 flooded out in six or eight places here to Elon, and I got right adjusted to having a wee roof leak and some slight ceiling damage. There's a brand new blue tarp on our roof and there's a good water spot in our ceiling, and I've been twice in the hated attic and once on the roof, and I do not in any way love heights or small spaces, and the light fixture AMR loathes to the core of her soul and I like quite a bit may well be an electrical hazard, but we have it fine, thanks, and plus I asked for this. I asked for Fay all last week and all this week. We got Fay. Some of us got Fay more than others of us. I spent the bulk of the midday thinking about Nature's Wrath and other assorted and overly-used cliches, so let's not dwell too much on that part of this other than to say: It rained. It rained a great deal. Things happened because it rained. Some of those things were not great.

And I have to say now, I guess, that even though Gustav may well spin itself out down there in the Gulf, it looks just as likely that it will drop itself on the Katrina Coast as a category 3 (or fiercer) hurricane, and if you had a kind of halfassed project having to do largely with the weather, and if you'd seen your neighbors with their thresholds under water this morning, then maybe perhaps you'd be doing a kind of late-evening introspective dance having to do with what it means to be beholden to whatever it is that might come at us out of the sky. It rained like all hell. It rained all night. To quote Randy Newman: Some people got lost in the flood, some people got away all right.

Those 3.9 inches are the largest 24-hour total in the brief history of ANYLF. The local fancies were saying that the Latham Park flooding was the worst in 20 years. We had water in the ceiling, on our table. We had it in the house, but we didn't really have it in the house. I just plain hurt for those people in Latham Park. I couldn't make it make sense this morning, pre-coffee, standing there naked and blinking and fogged-over, trying to understand why the newspaper was wet, why the light fixture would be dripping. But the floor was mostly dry. The water was not at our door.

It's cool out there as we head toward Thursday. Post-storm cool. There may be more left. There may be something else headed this way. Get your blue tarps bricked down out there, people. Dump out the rain gauges. Get ready to measure the next one.