Rain, rain, go away

We've got torrential rain approaching from the west, and the weather reports are frantic with warnings about flooding. I tend to worry when severe weather is forecast, spending a lot of time staring out the window and refreshing the weather.com radar map page, trying to decide whether it's getting better or worse.

When Hurricane Katrina's remnants were coming through Arkansas, back in 2005, I was terrified about the prospects of flooding because of the extended heavy rain. Some safety book that I had read with Archer mentioned always having shoes under your bed. I put my rain boots and socks under my bed that night, and fully expected to wake up and find that my bedroom looked like a kiddie pool.

We live in the middle of our block, right where the storm drain takes runoff into the sewers. For years after we got here, heavy rain could flood the street right at the foot of our driveway. On one strange afternoon, the water came all the way up to our garage -- and the storms weren't even very bad that day. The Conway storm sewers are beset by beaver dams in some parts of the city, and blockages used to be common.

Our tax dollars have paid for lots of improvements since then. This past summer road crews dug up our neighborhood streets and installed deeper drainage channels and higher curbs. There have been some hard rains and big storms since then, but no flooded streets. Tonight will certainly test those systems; over two inches of rain is forecast, with some storms possibly dumping much more, very quickly.

As we were driving through a gullywasher to pick up dinner after Archer's speech therapy, Cady Gray confidently started singing "Rain, rain, go away" to make the rain go away. Ah, the confidence of youth. She also said that it was raining cats and dogs, and Noel told a story about how he used to say it was "raining ducks" when he was a kid because he thought the drops splashing looked like ducks.

Archer processed that for a beat. "The ducks are the puddles," he opined. "And the cats are the soft rain, and the dogs are the hard rain."