The arena today after three days of storms.

We have had brutal rain showers since Memorial Day.  They came in like a wrecking ball (I know, overused words, but so true!) mid-afternoon on Monday.  I had gotten the horses (including our new boarder, Cody) into their stalls.  My phone started its frightening screeching sound that signifies something really important was occurring and I looked at it to find we were under a “take cover” Tornado warning.

My mother is from Oklahoma.  I spent a lot of my youth in the tornado prone areas of Illinois.  My mother made sure every tornado warning was met with an instant retreat to basement corner of our house.   I don’t think I have been through too many non-hurricane related tornado warnings since.  I certainly had not yet thought through where in our new house we would take cover in the event of a tornado.

I stood in the metal barn, watching the rain fall contemplating what I should do next.  I should have reacted more quickly and headed to the house but I did not.  In this particular case, I was safe and the tornado passed safely away from us.  Lauren was caught in the Memorial day traffic making its way back to Houston from the beaches of Padre Island and Corpus Christi.  I was scared for her.

Just as she safely arrived home, the downpour started.  We rushed to close the doors and windows of barn.  The barn roof had been sealed just days before but we quickly found out a few places were still not completely water tight.  The rain rushed into our new old barn, but fortunately it fell on the side used for storage and not the stalls.

The rain ran like a river through the storage side of the barn.

As more and more small leaks sprouted in the barn, Lauren and I got more anxious and frenzied.  For seven years we have been fighting floods to our property and barns.  We felt we were safe in our new home. Then the sky seemed to collapse and water just poured.  I have to say we got a little worked up.  Not even 24 hours had passed since our first boarder arrived and we felt due to our prior experience with rain of this nature, that we would shortly be evacuating horses and apologizing to our new guest.

Things looking a little brighter today.

But then almost as quickly as my frenzied feelings came over me, they went away.  Listening to the radio it became clear that this was not, not, not normal and we could live many years here without ever seeing storms like this again.  Now, pulling my wide-eyed frantic daughter down to this same brilliant conclusion was not so easy.  My momma used to call it “awfulizing” and Lauren was doing an excellent job of only seeing the positively worst scenarios coming our way.

In the end, over 60 hours of rain and storms later, we had received a total of almost seven inches of rain.  Anyone ever get seven inches of rain before?  I feel it was a pretty unusual happening.  The stalls stayed totally dry.  The horses stayed in, dry and reasonably happy in their stalls.  We will have to add some sand and build up the storage side of the barn.  But until we see rain of Biblical proportions again, I think we found out we could ride out the average storm, and even a pretty bad one.

This is not our old farm and we will be safer, drier and calmer here, once we unwind some of our previous learned responses.

Back in a soggy but green pasture.

Thanks for riding along with us!  Hope everyone got through the storms okay.