a heavy rain

Okay so it is still raining.
I have my own flood story, I am thinking some people do ... have their own flood story.
Here is mine.
I was living alone, in my late forties, in the woods. I called it the woods.
I was in Appalachia and living on what we called river road. My house sat right in front of the river ... from every room in my house I could see the river and from every room in my house I could hear the river. Marvelous.
The water would coast over the rocks and the sound was a constant companion.
I lived there for years. And years.
And only one year did the river rise so high that it threatened my home and my life. It have been raining and raining. Sometimes the front end of the road, down
toward the four lane, would flood and you would just take the back way to town ... the beautiful back way .... climbing up the hills, by the waterfalls, twisting and turning you way to town. It took about a full half hour longer.
Anyway ... one morning I woke up in my second floor bedroom that faced the river, looked out the window expecting to see a large yard with meandering rock paths through the wisely planted rhododendron down to the road and then to the river. But there was no yard, no "rhodies" as I called them, there was no land. There was only water as far as I could see. I was Rapunzel without the hair.
And the odd thing about a river flooding is that it creates another fast track other than the one way out in the middle ... there were passages in my yard going like heck for Tennessee. Swirling hard and fast. Little rivers in the big river which wasn't that big in the beginning.
Well I was full panic when I got down to the front door. I moved the car and the truck up and in the barn with my dogs inside. I went down to check the basement and the water was more than 5 feet high. I could not in that second figure out what to do ... the yard was inching near the first step to the house and the basement still had some space ... I joked about pumping the river into the basement ... to myself ... and then I got the sump pump set up, and it began its work, adding the basement water to the yard, down the long driveway now mostly covered with river water.
In a short two hours, I could begin to see the water inching away from the house.
I felt blessed in that moment. Seriously blessed.
The slow movement back to the confines of a river bank. It took days.
The debris, the rotting things, the insects, it was devastating what was left behind.
Just devastating.
And for a long time and even now ... a heavy rain makes my heart beat faster.