Feeling: relieved, now
Listening to: silence
Reading/Watching: Yankee Stranger, by Elswyth Thane

It's 11:45 on Wednesday night (except it's not anymore). Do you know where your children are?

Well, if your children are mon coeur and myself, they are still driving back from visiting Hometown.

They are driving 70 mph (woulda been 80, but it's night, and the speed limit is 65) down an interstate highway watching lightning flash ahead, to the sides, and in the sky above them, so bright that they barely need headlights. They are hoping that they skirt the edge of the "big storm" that dad worried over before they left.

They are watching the rain come down, not in gradual patters, but as if they drove into the portion of the world where the "rain" switch was turned on. Thick sheets, with the wipers on max, not doing much good. The rain is bouncing off the road from the impact of the droplets, creating a yellowish miasma in the odd light. The lightning is flashing one, two, three times in the space of five seconds, so close overhead that the road is swallowed in glare and the lines on the road are no longer visible.

The rain is so thick that they can't see if there is shoulder, ditch, or parked car on the side of the road. I'm easing off the gas, hoping to see better, and it makes no difference. And then the hail comes down, looking like snowflakes, sounding like coins.

My internal little Catholic girl starts praying. "HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththee..." counting the rosary on my fingers, which are currently white-knuckling the steering wheel. The counting, the words, just the sound of my own voice is comforting. It keeps the nose of the car straight. It focuses the lines on the road, branding their memory when the lightning is too bright.

"Um, Katie? Why are you saying things like 'the hour of our death'?" he is trying to calm me down, but using the tone of voice he has when he is mentally rehearsing the knots in my straight-jacket.

"It's 'now and at the hour of our death;' it's just part of the words," I say, laughing a little, but not much. If we pull over, we'll be in this longer, and the hailstones dinging onto the roof are making me angry and protective of my beautiful new-ish little car, and I refuse to stop and let them pelt her for longer. So we will just continue to drive along at our breakneck clip of (I check the speedometer)... thirty miles per hour. I'd worry about being rear-ended, but someone else has pulled up behind us and is going our speed, following our tail lights for security.

This went on for three hours fifteen minutes, and by the end I was ready to snap, knowing that if so much as a jackrabbit crossed the road in front of us, we'd skid around the pavement until something blocked our path, like a guard rail or a building or another car. Finally, the hail let up, and the rain became merely heavy instead of buckets-in-your-face, and we pulled off into a gas station "to get drinks" but really because my nerves needed a minute to unjangle. And there's a couple dings on the roof of the car. Sonofabitch.

It was then I told mon coeur that by the way, we're driving through a floodplain.

Ah, the wacky, wacky fun of "mild" Texas weather.

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