God willing and the creeks don't rise

But the creeks do rise. From the house or the car, noting that water is up four feet from normal is a mathematical calculation. It is another thing entirely to watch it seethe, only feet away from its brown currents as I wait for the school bus: It roars, leaving the grass flattened as evidence of its volume. Occasionally a dark limb will show itself among the opaque ripples to be sucked into obscurity again. What else might lurk there is an unspoken threat.

We have a new railroad tie on our bank.

Winter rains are a different beast: with nothing growing to drink the water and the ground already saturated with a week of drizzly days, 16 hours of steady rain just ran down slopes, filled ditches, funneled into branches, poured into creeks... and I can't imagine what the Toe River looks like.

It is a temporary terror this time, though.

They are already falling again, the creeks, sweeping the topsoil and stray twigs to new locales. And this morning a rare sun burned off the mists and reflected in a thousand puddles, brighter for all the darkened earth and wet trees.