An Island

Whenever you move somewhere, you're told the same thing. If you don't like the weather here, just stick around: it'll change. Well, maybe not in Florida... But in most places this is somewhat true. If you stay anywhere long enough the weather will change. But in Muncie, you only have to wait a day or two. 

Take, for instance, today. Yesterday was partly cloudy; 50˚ or so. There was snow left on the ground from Friday (when we got six inches overnight). All last night, however, it rained. A true summer thunderstorm, in February. The lightning kept me awake, and apparently some tornado sirens went off (I was gratefully asleep by then). 

This morning I woke up at 5:50 a.m., like usual, to go to my early morning seminary class. The rain had stopped, and I could barely make out the beginnings of a small pond in our backyard. If only we had done it on purpose, we'd have a lovely (albeit muddy) water feature beautifully located by our garden! 

Sleepily my sister and I drove to the church building. Perhaps it was because I had just woken up, or maybe because I was dutifully watching the road, but I didn't really look to the side to see all of the neighborhood insta-ponds that had sprung up (down?) overnight. As I attempted to turn onto the road to the church, I realized that there was no way we were going to be able to drive down it. The road, and two of the three church entrances to the parking lot that I could see, were flooded. I turned around and went around to the back entrance to find another flooded street.

I wound up just driving through the least flooded of the three entrances, the back one. It soaked the outside of our ancient minivan, and I was worried I'd gotten the engine wet (not that I even know what that would do). I rolled down the window to try to listen to our engine, but it sounded just as terrible as it usually does, so it wasn't much of a diagnostic. Because our teacher couldn't get her small car through the "puddle", the three cars that had made it into the parking lot convened and decided that seminary would be canceled due to flooding. Then the six of us (three girls, two guys, and a ferret: don't ask me what it was doing there) decided to trek our way back through the entrance and go home. 

It struck me, as we slowly inched through back across the water, exactly how much the church was like a castle or an island: surrounded by a moat of rainwater on all sides. If only the school cafeteria had been lucky enough to be on high ground...