One day that November, when the rain flooded every neighborhood except the train station, which was on higher ground, Dad left the house early in the afternoon to check on Grandma. Because her house was flooded when he got there, Dad took longer than he had expected to help her, and by the time he finished, the water had risen so high that he couldn’t get back home safely because neither he nor Grandma had a canoe or a raft. Even worse, there was no way for him to communicate with us, so by dinnertime, when he hadn’t come home, we were terrified that he might have drowned.
Around 8:00 p.m. that evening, the water in the street rose so high that it covered our floor with a foot of water. As we watched it rising, we carried our four wooden chairs into the attic and placed two blocks of bricks on top of our wooden kitchen table to keep it from floating around and bumping into things. Then we brought our pig inside from the backyard, pulling her up onto our wooden couch to keep it from floating around in the living room, and to keep the pig from drowning. Getting that pig on the couch took five of us, because it was so heavy—at least 250 pounds. Luckily, Mom had already sold the younger pigs.
After we took all the perishable goods from the kitchen up into the attic, Mom stayed awake all night, crying as she waited for Dad, and we kids couldn’t sleep either because we were so worried about him. Our relief was enormous when he walked in the next morning.