The Rescue!

  Last night saw the Little Bayou House being battered by high winds.  Limbs and who knows what else slammed the windows and pelted the rooftop.  Several times, the house trembled when gale force winds smashed against it.  All night the windows rattled and the house creaked and groaned.  Then, lightning started bouncing around the Bayou and the hillside.  Thunder crashed causing the house to shake that much more. Suddenly.....rain.  Hard rain.  From about midnight until the early morning hours, almost three inches of rain fell.  This was fine with me.  I was snug as a bug inside the Little Bayou House so I merely sat back and enjoyed a fine storm.

  This morning things looked clean.  The wind and water had washed the world!  I was happy to see that the soaking rains actually made the gardens look that much better.  Everything looked so fresh, the sun was shining and temperatures were in the seventies.  What a wonderful day!  Nothing was amiss after such a intense bit of weather...or at least I thought!  Early this afternoon, I heard a knock on my door.  My brother stopped in to ask a simple question.  That question ended up being quite an ordeal.  "What happened to the bench on your pier?"  Huh?  What was he saying?  My bench?  I had been on the pier earlier and never paid much attention to the bench.  I had gone down to turn on the pump in Mark's small skiff.  Sometimes the thing gets stuck and refuses to pump out rainwater.  I never thought to look for the bench.  I called Michael.  "Son, lets head to the pier.  The bench is missing."

  Sure enough, the bench was gone!   After a bit of pondering, I spied something far, far down the shoreline. Could that be our bench?  After a bit of discussion, Michael decided to hop in the skiff and investigate.  He poled his way down the shoreline until he was near the object in the marsh.  He reached over to haul it in the boat and was on his way back to the pier!  My bench was rescued!  After Michael scooted the bench back on the pier, he made a point of tying it securely to one of the pier posts. That bench was there to stay!

  Other than a few limbs down here and there, the missing bench was the worst damage from the storm.  At least that is all that I noticed!  Tomorrow, I will venture back behind the house.  Hopefully, I will not find any more surprises from the storm during that hike!  One stolen bench was enough!