SOAKED!

Off I started this afternoon to pick up my daughter from school in my jacket and jeans with my 4-year-old son and the dog under overcast, but non-threatening skies. Two blocks later, it started to sprinkle. When we reached the school a block later, it started to rain harder and quickly turned into a deluge of Biblical proportions.

Now, school policy dictates that you are not to leave the street level if you have a dog along. Human instinct, however, doesn't give a flying frog what the rules are when you are getting soaked to the bone. I dashed up to the school next to the exit I knew my daughter would be coming out of and waited under the shelter of the school overhang.

When an adult supervisor came out the door and saw the three of us standing there, I immediately began babbling about our precarious situation like I was trying to negotiate our way into the embassy on foreign soil. Not that the shelter we were under was luxurious by any means. The rain was coming down so furiously that the eave began to leak in several random places, so we had to find a circle of dry above us in order to keep from getting wet anyway.

From the bewildered look she was giving me, I assessed that she had no intention of throwing us out into the weather again, and my brain mercifully turned off my mouth. Then I spotted my husband pull up in our ark (aka, the minivan) and my cell phone began ringing, affirming my hopes that we would indeed somehow get out of this purgatory.

The children that began to stream out of the school were, of course, delighted by the sudden change in the weather and gleefully screamed in a chorus of what I can only describe as gym whistles. The dog began a pulsing whine at this, and I suddenly noticed that my son was joyfully standing directly under a steady stream of water that had worked its way through another leak in the roof.

My son's rain-soaked shoes, pants, under-
wear, and socks exactly where he took them
off when we got in the door.

My daughter finally emerged from the school and we waved her down. S-l-o-w-l-y, she put on the light jacket I sent her to school in this morning as we started our sprint-walking to the van down at the street level again. When we reached the bottom of the hill, it was apparent that the only way we were getting across the rushing rapids forming in the gutters was to step directly in the middle of them. My mind quickly did an inventory of how many pairs of dry rain boots are sitting in the coat closet and belittled itself for not thinking to put any of them on in the same thought. Did I mention that we bought a stupid raincoat for the dog for just sort an occasion? Yeah, that was also still hanging in the coat closet.

We finally reached the van, loaded the drenched dog in the back, and piled inside the heated paradise. It wasn't until I was out of the rain that I realized the only part of my outfit that was still dry was the back of my upper leg. A short drive and we were home again, and when we stepped out of the van, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had started.

Ha, ha, God. Very funny. Fool me once, blah, blah, blah.

~Paula