As I was walking around my yard today, I noticed that despite our attempt to keep up with the weeds, they have sprouted tall and big and strong. That’s what two weeks away, lots of July heat, humidity, and thunderstorms will do to those pesky weeds.

Yes, there are a lot of tall, bright green weeds growing in my garden. They’ve grown and spread out of control. In the past two weeks, other things have sprung up, just like those weeds, out of my control.

The past two weeks have had a lot of loveliness, moment of joy and peace and togetherness. My family and I have been on vacation, and it had all the elements of a great vacation: long car rides, crabby kids and parents, mosquitoes and sunburn; quiet hikes in an ancient forest, drifting down the river in a canoe, getting sprayed by the waters of Niagara Falls.

It was during the second week that those pesky weeds really started growing during our time away.

I had planned to write some blog posts during that second week; the house we were renting has wireless internet, I had my laptop, and we were going to have some time to relax. However, as I tried to start my laptop that Sunday morning, the computer would not start up no matter what I tried to do. Restoring the computer to an earlier time wasn’t working; my IT husband didn’t have any resources with him to troubleshoot the problem, and so we gave up. We decided it was a blessing in disguise to be without our laptop so that we could fully concentrate on our vacation.

Another weed…early Wednesday morning, Emmy called desperately for me; she had thrown up all over her bed. Ed and I soothed her and cleaned up the mess. After a couple more episodes and a couple loads of laundry, her stomach finally settled down. Emmy and I both slept on the large couch in the living room. When Emmy woke up the next morning, she gave me a huge grin. I knew then that she was feeling better.

But just a couple of days later, Lily caught the same stomach bug. The morning we were supposed to leave, I was sick. As I lay in bed, Ed and my sister packed up our things and got the car ready. As we drove toward Illinois, I couldn’t wait to be in the comfort of my own soft bed.

Despite being achy, our drive was smooth going until we reached the highway exit by our house. It was closed and we couldn’t figure out why. There shouldn’t be any construction. As we pulled of the ramp going east instead of west, I saw that the ramp was covered in water.

Uh-oh.

As we tried to turn west toward home, which also meant we had to cross the river, we had more “uh-oh” moments. More roads were flooded and more bridges were closed. We found a street that was open and crept the van slowly through the water that threatened to close that road as well.

As we finally drove through our neighborhood, I prayed that our basement wouldn’t have water in it.

It did.

What a tall weed we had come home to!

First Ed unpacked the car, then he started emptying the basement. (Most of the water had already gone back down into the sewer…it was all sewer backup.) I went up to the bedroom to rest, and after taking a nap felt well enough to help him.

Overall, we have some ruined carpet that we tore out (we wanted to get rid of it anyway). Some of our books got too wet to salvage (my art books from college and an old set of encyclopedias) and a small amount of my teaching files were also wet.

It could have been much worse. We use our basement for storage, and most things are kept in plastic tubs. There was only about an inch or two, and the water only covered about two thirds of the basement. Our neighbor told us that early Saturday morning, there had been 7 inches of rain in 2 hours. That’s a lot of water. It turns out our sump pump wasn’t running, so Ed installed new sump pump last night. Even if the pump had been working, there’s no guarantee we would have come home to a dry basement.

And Ed got my laptop up and running again. Yay!

We have lots of pictures to remind us of the good things that happened on vacation. Despite those weeds, we built a lot of family memories during the past two weeks, and I’ll write more stories about our vacation soon.

(Those weeds won’t get the best of us!)

Here’s a photo I took of our evening stroll in Niagara Falls. The lights were shining on Horseshoe Falls, we had just had a wonderful dinner at a restaurant overlooking the falls, and Lily and Emmy were enjoying every minute of their evening…as we were allowing them to stay up waaaay past their bedtime.

The moon rising over Niagara Falls; July, 2011

Hoping you are having a wonderful summer as well,