Our bedroom flooded last night.

This was inconvenient timing because we have a house guest through the end of the week, which means that space is at a premium in the Burrow for the moment. At least Sam is an old friend (who has seen us at our messiest) who doesn’t mind sharing the living room with all our laundry.

On the other hand, the timing could have been much worse because the Burrow will be unattended for four days while we’re out in California. How awful would it have been to come home to a flooded (and probably by that point mildewed) bedroom?!

The rug we had in the bedroom prevented the waters from seeping into the living room. Mum and I bought it before my sophomore year of college and it was nice in all the many places it ultimately lived. But it was 13 years old and it’s hard to feel devastated about an inexpensive rug biting the dust after all that time. Some books need to dry in a substantial way and our duvet will need to go to the cleaner (probably time for that anyway). The box a painting was sitting in got wet, but the painting did not. A broken laundry basket we hadn’t gotten around to throwing away (and which I’d meant to get rid of last week before Sam and Alexis arrived) prevented a lot of things from getting wet. (All the knitters reading this can rest assured that all my yarn sits in a cabinet three feet off the floor; I can’t even say that about the books!) All in all, while this was not what I wanted to come home to after work on a Monday evening, it could have been much, much worse.

My family seems to be plagued by recurrent flooding. My folks’ old house was on a slab floor (meaning it has no basement) and in addition to the minor spot flooding they’d get during nasty rainstorms and hurricanes, they also had devastational flooding twice in just over 18 months. It was bad enough that they had to replace the carpeting both times. Then they moved into their new house where they’ve had minor flooding once as well as a mildew attack in the basement. Gramma’s roof sprung a leak last winter and seeped into an unused room where it caused some mildew problems. Our living room flooded last year. The only really surprising thing is that none of us lived in New Orleans when it ended up under water last year.

There has to be a novel in all of this somewhere. Anybody got a great first line for it?