When I talked about taking the dog swimming in the backyard in that entry yesterday, I bet you thought I was kidding.

I wasn’t. Wow, did we get rained on yesterday! It was pounding down so hard we couldn’t see across the street.

The first picture is my back yard along the property line. It’s about two feet deep at the deepest point back there. The second picture is the empty lot behind my neighbor’s place. That’s about 2-4 feet deep at the deepest point. All that water in there is the reason why that lot was never built on. It’s part of the property of the house immediately behind our place, and all they do with it is mow it.

(When the place was up for sale a couple of years ago I wanted to buy it just to get that empty lot. Would have split it off, sold the house with a normal sized lot, and kept the empty one for gardens. My wife thought I was nuts. Well, yeah, I am, but that lot would have essentially cost us nothing. Cutting it off from the house property wouldn’t have diminished the cost of the house by more than a couple of thousand bucks.)

What happens back there is this: Hilbert is, when it comes right down to it, pretty much built on a swamp. There’s no place for the water to go when we get a pounding rain. The drainage systems fill up and can’t carry the water away. One of the first years we lived in this town, we had one of those proverbial “100 year rains” which seem to happen every 10 years or so. The wooden frames around our flower and vegetable beds, well, one ended up across the street in the neighbor’s back yard, the other ended up about 5 houses down the street. We had 3 feet of water in our garage. Literally every basement in town was full of water because everyone has floor drains, and the sewer system started working in reverse, pumping water into houses instead of sucking it away.