Soooooo...

How 'bout that rain?

Some of you may remember that, in last week's column, I managed to take the credit - er, blame for the devastation that was the Flood of 2006. I take it back.

And I'd also like to explain, for the record, that as of my deadline, the rain was little more than an annoyance. It was the canceller of tee times and afternoon jogs. Had I pushed my deadline by one more day, when the rain became something much more grave, I could have spared myself the embarrassment of unwittingly claiming responsibility for an unprecedented natural disaster.

Editors beware: That is the very excuse I plan to use for all future occasions on which I push my deadlines. The past week since the flooding had been eerily familiar for my family.

We moved here from Northwest Florida in March for two reasons: We love Central New York - the people, the landscape, the climate (don't laugh), the school taxes; we hate hurricanes. The horizontal rain, the whistling wind, the tornadoes, the uprooted trees, the evacuations, the near misses, the direct hits, the weeks afterward when everything is broken, nothing looks familiar and every person walks around in a daze.

In September 2004, we boarded up our windows, gathered our flashlights and tucked in for a night of what we thought would be another hurricane like all the others my husband and I had experienced growing up along Florida's Gulf Coast.

We pulled all the mattresses into the living room, and just as we were settling in to sleep, I felt a drop of water on my sheet. Then another. Then a trickle.

The beam of my flashlight revealed that the ceiling was leaking.

And this was hours before the storm even came ashore, bringing with it a 40-foot wall of water that swept over bridges and through homes and scattered the contents of many families' lives in its wake. That night, we moved from room to room as water poured - POURED - from every ceiling. We tried catching it in pots and trash cans and mixing bowls, but soon realized our efforts were futile. All things considered, we were pretty lucky. The water that flooded our house came from above, not below. Insurance covered that.

And because we were personally acquainted with a contractor, we were able to have our house repaired quickly. It only took one year - yes, 12 months - before we were able to move back into our fully repaired house.

Our next-door neighbor had not yet moved back into her house when we left in March. So it could have been worse for us there. And it could have been worse for us here.

Go anywhere in town and you'll hear about the people who got the worst of it. People who lost homes or businesses. People who lost everything. People who lost their lives or lost people they loved. And you can bet we'll keep hearing those stories. It doesn't matter whether you lost a home or lost a fingernail; when the sky falls or the rivers rise, it's terrifying.

Your sense of security erodes like the shoulder of an old highway. When you see how easily and swiftly water or wind can take down a tree, you start to step lightly and test the ground under your feet. And you talk about it.

You talk about where you were, how many gallons you pumped from the basement and how scared your dogs were.

You talk about what was closed, which roads washed out and who lost something important.

And you ask everyone you see:

"How's your place?"

"Is your mom OK?"

"Do you need anything?"

You share. You share your time, your tools, a cup of tea. And somehow - don't ask me, because I can't understand how it works - somehow all that sharing makes the ground under your feet feel a little more dry and a lot more solid.

Elizabeth Trever Buchinger is a freelance writer who believes her Sloggers are the smartest shoe purchase she has ever made. She can be reached at VillageWordsmith@hughes.net.