For most of this week, I’ve had a song stuck in my head. I get that a lot and sometimes for more than a week, thanks to my particular brand of OCD, where a random song will start to loop and I can’t stop it, to the point where I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s still playing. I wrote about this previously (check out It’s Toxic for more), and it usually happens when I’m very stressed. And what is the song, you ask? It’s The Rain, Rain, Rain, Came Down, Down, Down from the Disney feature Winnie The Pooh and the Blustery Day. In the story, it rains so much that Piglet and Pooh are flooded out of their homes, and I don’t know why anyone would think that was adorable and totally appropriate for small children. I remember watching it as a small child myself and being very afraid for Piglet. Of course, back then I couldn’t swim, so I assumed anyone surrounded by water would just drown.

And why do you have that particular song stuck in your head, you ask? Because last week, I was beset—nay, besieged, by torrential rain wherever I went. It started last Sunday when I did a book fair at a town not far from here. It was an outdoor event, so Ken and I loaded up the table, chairs, and the canopy/tent we’d gotten cheap off Facebook Marketplace. It was a sweltering day and we were both exhausted by the time we got the tent up, having forgotten how it all went together and taking extra long in the full sun for the debacle. No sooner had the event started, and people arrived, when the skies took an ominous turn. Ken had left by this point, wanting to go home and mow the lawn, and he called me to say that he was halfway home and it was teeming down. Then the thunder started. Then the downpour came. I threw tarps over everything then spent the next hour hanging on to my cheap-ass tent for dear life as the wind threatened to turn it into a parasail. I got soaked to the skin and only sold one book the entire afternoon.

Then, on Monday, as we kept getting shower after shower, I got worried about the basement. It’s a partial basement and crawlspace and it’s always a little damp but we have a dehumidifier that keeps things under control. On Tuesday morning though, the skies opened and we got rain like we’ve never seen rain before. I didn’t think much of it until I heard the sump pump running endlessly. So I opened the basement door to take a peek. There was a small river running across the basement floor, and I just about lost my mind:

Me: Ken! There’s water everywhere!
Ken: It’ll be ok. The sump pump isn’t broken this time.
Me: What if the power goes off?!
Ken: Then we’re screwed.
Me: OMG, the house is going to collapse!
Ken: The house has been standing for almost 120 years. It will be fine. We just need to—

And that’s when the song started. It’s been playing in my head as we mopped, as we shopvac’d, as I fretted, and as Ken put down hydraulic cement.

Luckily, the hydraulic cement seems to have done the trick for the time being, until we can get someone in to take a proper look. But they’re all busy right now because a lot of other people got a lot more water in than we did and sustained a heck of a lot more damage, one of the advantages of us having a creepy basement that I’m pretty sure is haunted so we don’t keep anything down there that a ghost would like. And the upside? I’ve been singing the rain song wrong all these years, as I found out when I watched the YouTube video just now, so now my brain can do it right. And the rain, rain, rain, came down, down, down…