Then came the summer. We endured 45 straight days, from late July through early September, with temperatures above 100º. Now, it gets hotter than that in SoCal, but only for a few days at a time, and that’s a dry heat. This is that humid heat known by everybody who lives 150 miles or more east of north/south line extending from El Paso to the Canadian border. In the middle of this heat, we bought a house, emptied a storage facility, bought mostly new furniture, and moved into our new house. I thought my underwear would melt. In any case, all of my new neighbors assured me that this heat wave “isn’t normal.”
In November, we got the first of the snow storms to hit the area this year. It wasn’t a bad one. We used to get much worse ones that that regularly in El Paso. It just seemed a little early for it. Then we had a few more. In fact, the entire winter was punctuated with snow and ice storms - weather in which I actually used 4 wheel drive on the freeway because the roads were so slick. It didn’t really bother me. I had the proper clothing for it, and it was a welcome change both from the August heat wave, and from the unceasingly balmy weather of SoCal. Never the less, everyone assured me that this “isn’t normal.”
Then came the spring - and the rain. We had tornadoes. We had hailstones the size of tangerines on my front lawn. We had the most violent storms than anyone around here had seen in several years. However, they all assured us not to worry, because this “wasn’t normal.”
Now we’ve arrived to summer again. A couple of days ago was the 1 year anniversary of the date my family joined me here in Texas. Where last year we were sweltering, this year we are drowning. It has rained unrelentingly, almost every single day for weeks now. And it is not just “rain,” it is a veritable deluge. One town near Austin experienced 19 inches of rain between midnight and 7:00 a.m. the other day. Local lakes, which last year were getting low enough to be of concern to the authorities, are now so full that lakeside picnic tables are under 6 feet of water, and they are going to have to release water from the lakes, which is threatening the dams that retain it, into the already swollen Trinity River. The Trinity, which normally noodles slowly along a narrow channel, perhaps 20′ wide, has overflowed its banks and has flooded all the way out to and about a third of the way up the 30′ high levees which are located a couple of hundred yards off to the side of each bank. It is a massive amount of water, and it’s about to get worse.
However, I’m not worried, because everyone has assured me that all this rain “isn’t normal.”
If there is one thing I’ve learned about Texas weather since arriving here, it is that Texas weather is NEVER normal.
