It was raining when I went to bed Saturday night. In fact, Lynne was with us and left just before the hard rain began. I could see water moving steadily down the street toward the bayou. I wasn’t too worried. We’ve had heavy rains, even flooding, in Houston since we moved to Houndstooth Hall, and we’ve been okay.
Tim was away house- and dogsitting, so I slept at his house with his dogs. Around six AM, I heard a dog whimper next to me and thought, Oh, they’re probably hungry. I swung my feet out of bed and put them down in at least two inches of still-rising water.
That’s when I knew things were bad and likely to get worse, because the rain was torrential at that moment.
The below photo sums up a few things. I had to bend that screen to get it out of the window to hand Pixie, Penny, and Pollock out to Tom because there was less water in our house at the time than in the apartment. Dogs came first.
But immediately upon getting out of bed, as I was texting Tom and evaluating the water levels at the doors, I thought to do two other things. The first was to make sure Tim’s violin was safe (that’s his guitar case pictured here, because by the time I was shooting photos, Tom had moved the violin even higher). The violin was built by his great-grandfather and was one of the only things Tim kept with him wherever we were during previous hurricanes. The second was to move his painting of Rex by Houston artist Kermit Eisenhut to the safety of the table.
Things may be just things, but some of them we shouldn’t have to lose.