Doused with a dose of perspective

There's nothing like a little minor disaster to distract attention from major disasters, and it's helpful to occasionally be doused with a dose of perspective. Which is why I'm not complaining (much) about the flash flood that washed away part of my driveway Friday night. Sure, I've been mightily inconvenienced, but nobody died, right? I had to use some creativity to get around obstacles that washed across my path, but I thrive on creativity, so it's all good. Or it's all mud. Or something like that.

Friday felt like a disaster long before the flood hit. I spent the morning hours first having all kinds of uncomfortable eye tests at the cataract surgeon's office, then balked at the cost estimate and wondered whether my eyesight was really valuable enough to merit wiping out my entire health savings account, then spent some time squinting blurrily at final exam and papers, and then attended a campus meeting that left me feeling reamed out and hopeless, and then I finally got to go home--but I didn't take my laptop with me because I was sure I'd be back on campus Saturday morning to finish the final set of student papers before attending Commencement.

And sure, rain was in the forecast, but we've had plenty of rain this spring without problems, so when the sky started falling in earnest, I was totally unprepared. Frankly, I'm not sure how anyone could have prepared for that kind of deluge--when the normally placid creek suddenly starts thundering like Niagara Falls, it doesn't do any good to stand on the bridge declaring "Thus far and no further!" A chunk of wet sky fell into our area and transformed our tiny creek into a solid wall of water that overtopped its banks, inundated our lower meadow, tossed entire trees against our bridge, and wiped out part of the ramp that connects the bridge to the lowest part of the driveway.

What to do? No way to drive across all that water and no possibility of a gravel delivery over the weekend, so we mostly stayed put. No Commencement for me! (Good thing I wasn't slated to serve as Marshal this year.) But I needed to finish grading that last pile of papers, so I used my husband's laptop to sign into our course management system so I could access the papers and issue a grade. I didn't have access to my usual grading rubrics and I couldn't insert comments into the papers, but who reads comments on a final paper anyway? I decided to just wing it, and if the students want to quibble over the grade, I can deal with that later. 

But now the grading is done and the driveway is fixed and I'm getting caught up on all the things I couldn't do over the weekend without access to my laptop, which turns out to be quite a lot. But again, nobody died, and the inability to get to campus reminded me how very much I love my job and want to be able to see well enough to keep doing it, so I'll soon be scheduling that cataract surgery regardless of the cost. See? Perspective: sometimes it comes in little doses, and sometimes it falls like Niagara from the sky, but either way it can wash away the pervading gloom and make me feel a little less hopeless.

You really wouldn't want to drive on that mess.

Free delivery of firewood.

 

Debris shows that the bridge was under water overnight.

That's gravel from our driveway washed into the neighbor's field.

That tree usually stretches far above the water level.