How has it been so long? I didn’t forget about this blog, not in the least, rather, so very much has happened. I took to updating my stories on IG instead of the blog after Dad was gone. Four months after his death in January 2025 their property was hit without mercy by the torrential rains and land-changing floods in July. Perhaps it is time to start reliving it a bit, to document it better here. And almost a year later.
Right now I sit in the cottage that used to be the rental house on the property, tenant and all. Mom’s house is gone, as are her raised bed gardens she built, the pear and plum trees, the vineyard, and all her landscaping in the front yard that she painstakingly put in for the past 25 years.
The flood stole it all away July 4th-5th night last year. It took hundreds of saplings and established trees, carved at the riverside, and deposited hundreds of tons of boulders and caliche mix from upriver. The wall of water reached easily over 25 feet high on the property, evidenced by debris that still sits and waves in the branches of the trees left behind. Dad’s tools and shop were swept away as well, the only things left were the roof balanced on the joists well enough we could prop them up, and what tools we could find in the resulting mud. Most is buried and I will never see it again.
Two homes and the residents inside as well as their vehicles were swept across the street and rammed with immense force into mom’s house, which destroyed it and the shop. Mom and I escaped with our critters and our vehicles and go bags, but we knew nothing of what was lost until the sun rose the next morning.
I promise, I will tell the story once again. All of them, in fact. What my brain can remember, anyway.
Sitting now watching it rain outside the land has changed, and I hope so very much that it can change hands into my own. I never thought I’d have the chance to own this place, but here it is, and I want to grasp it and grow with it as it enters a new era. Mom is ready for her new life, and I am ready for mine.
A Burd in Flight 