The Rainy City

Seattle. It's not that wet of a city, really. Natives here know that the bark of our generally rather metallic looking sky is hardly equalled by the bite of its downpours. After all, we aren't even in the competition for "U.S. City With Most Annual Rainfall." So, we smile at the normalcy of our heavy cloud cover and shrug off the determined drizzle that dampens our atmosphere.

And then comes a day like today.

I enjoyed a lovely snowfall last Saturday. It doesn't snow here very often, so it's rather an exciting moment when it does. I wanted to catch and hold every snowflake forever. By the time three or four inches had fallen, our neighborhood looked every inch like the perfect Christmas card. Then we all went out to play and spread boot tracks into all its nooks and crannies.

When it does snow here, it rarely hangs around. This weekend was no exception. By Sunday afternoon it was raining. By the time I woke up this morning to the sound of a waterfall pouring out of the gutters, only a football sized lump of our once respectable snowman remained to eulogize a perfect weekend. I made an unusually brisk dash to the car and arrived only mildly damp. "Today," I smiled to myself, settling back for my twenty minute commute and turning on the windshield wipers, "it is a wet, wet world!"

Ten minutes later, still waiting on line to turn off of my street onto the main road, I started to understand what a scenic sort of day I was going to have. The lake that graced the intersection of my street with the main road even had ripples! Every passing car left a wake like a speed boat. As I carefully navigated the left turn onto the main road, leaving a lovely wake of my own, I shuddered, "It's a wet, wet world!"

One hour and forty minutes afterwards, still having only navigated six miles, I arrived at work. If you were to guess that I had been forced to take a rather tedious and moderately circuitous route to work because of flooding and road closures, you would be guessing correctly.

Safe in the dry building, I discovered I wasn't the only employee late to work. As the morning flew by, all of us were a bit jumpy and held frequent excited discussions about the weather while admiring the speed with which a river could form in our parking lot. In the end, our office building was evacuated by the city and I spent an amazingly tedious three hours and twenty minutes inching along the only remaining route out of the flooding area, through a frustrating maze of various circuitous routes, and, eventually, arrived safely home.

Seattle. It's a wet city after all.