May 2015 was the wettest month in recorded history for Texas, by a wide margin. DFW got an absurd amount of rain, 16.96 inches in May alone and 25.05 inches from March through May. It just rained and rained and rained.
So you can imagine my excitement when I got clear skies and sunshine for my day off work yesterday. The school year just ended on Friday, so the kids and I headed out to get stuff done and enjoy the glorious weather.
I had to pay up Mahogany’s board for June, so that was one of our stops.
The pasture looks great, and the wildflowers are still in bloom.
We decided to hike back to the Trinity River and see how full it was. Just getting to it turned out to be an adventure. A back pasture had become a lake, and we had to wade through one edge of it since it extended past the fence on both sides.
Then we crossed a nice stretch of high ground, and then we came to the woods and those were flooded too.
We slogged through that, and finally came to the bank of the Trinity.
Okay, just for context, here is an old pic of how the Trinity usually looks…
…and a pic I took yesterday from the same spot:
Here’s another old shot, same bank but facing the other way…
…and here’s one from that angle that I took yesterday:
The river was unrecognizable. As soon as we saw it, we immediately made plans to go tubing on it this summer.
On the way back, Elizabeth dropped her phone in the flooded woods and then spent like ten panicky minutes dredging around for it in the murky water.
I was waiting for her on dry ground, but when she couldn’t find her phone and refused to leave without it, I waded back in to help her look. Eventually we found it, long after I had given up any hope of it surviving the mishap. Miraculously, it took no apparent damage at all. She turned it back on the instant she found it, still dripping wet, and it started right up.
Luke’s phone got a little damp last week from being in his pocket while he walked home from school in the rain, and it flatlined and had to be replaced. Elizabeth’s phone spent somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes submerged in two feet of muddy floodwater and just shrugged it off. Technology is weird.
The sunshine felt really good, so our next stop was a nearby park. I wanted to see what the ponds looked like after all the rain.
This pond is brand new; it wasn’t there before:
The regular ponds had overflowed their banks.
This stand of trees usually marks the border between the two ponds, where there’s a sort of concrete bridge that I like to cross on Mahogany. Yesterday I couldn’t even see the bridge.
As of this writing, there’s no more rain in the forecast. I am ridiculously happy about that. I mean, we definitely needed the rain that we got, but enough is enough. Hooray for sunshine.
An Invincible Summer 