RainyAgainDay

On my way back to Bloomington from Santa Barbara on Saturday, while I sat in the first row of an Embraer short-haul vectored to Indianapolis but delayed while awaiting its pilot and parked at the far end of the strangely long jetway at O'Hare's Gate C6, everyone in the first few rows of the plane bonded with the crew in talk about central Indiana's monsoonal weather this month.

All of us were returning from elsewhere, including the crew, which was based in Indianapolis. And all of us felt lucky that this time there were no thunderstorms on our route. But the stories people told were amazing. Most were returning to flooded streets, damaged roofs, and fallen trees. Some were headed to the flood zone of the normally shallow White River, which was about to rise 20 feet. The word derecho was in everyone's vocabulary, for good reason.

I was an outlier because Bloomington is a bit south of the main action, and I had also been gone for a month. So I nodded along and didn't mention that I was returning from Santa Barbara, where it's fire season but otherwise paradisal. I'm also writing this on our patio, where the temperature is an unusually cool 79° and the humidity is a typically high 83%. I am shaded by an overcast sky and a canopy of lush vegetation drunk on water, and serenaded by a hundred birds. Hard to get real work done, but otherwise a nice welcome back.