When I was around 13, a tornado hit the small town where I grew up. School paused for a bit because the elementary school was damaged by the storm.
When I moved to Florida, several days were missed across the years due to school closings brought on by the threat of hurricanes. This is when I became intimately aware of the phrase “hunker down.”
To this day, there’s nothing else that I can think of that would lead me to hunker down other than a hurricane.
In Philadelphia, ice storms, blizzards and extraordinarily hot days caused school closings.
When I moved to Colorado, I figured my best bet was a snow day or two. Even that seemed a pipe dream given the infrastructure’s response time when snow falls and the fact that the snowfall melts so quickly after it falls thanks to sun’s nearness.
Then there was this morning when I woke up to a text message alerting me to the closing of the local university.
“That’s weird,” I thought and decided just to check to see if my district might have made a similar surprising move.
They did.
School was canceled today because of water and its tremendous fortitude and destructive power.
The last I heard, at least one person had lost their life because of the rain that continues to fall on Boulder County. This is to say nothing of the roads that are now washed away, the homes with unspeakable water damage and the now-unsafe water supply of a nearby town.
The street one block away looks like a mud-red river. Cars have been carried downhill, basements are flooded, and families are trying to figure out what to do next.
All the while, it continues to rain. We’ve seen more rain in the last few days than all the summer combined.
A few days ago, Apple announced two new phones that harolded our further command over information, communication and connectivity to one another.
About an hour ago, I lost my Internet connection, and cell phone reception in my basement apartment is consistently spotty.
We’ve been beaten down…by water.
It’s a humbling reminder.