Ponds

"It rained and it rained and it rained. Piglet told himself that never in all his life, and he was goodness knows how old⁠—three, was it, or four?⁠—never had he seen so much rain. Days and days and days."

From "Winnie-the-Pooh: IX In Which Piglet is Entirely Surrounded by Water"

Fortunately the soul is so free-draining that this was gone within a hour or two of the rain stopping.

Unfortunayely while it continued to rain our land is the recipient of the directed run-off of 4 sections above us - each in turn redirecting water flowing on to theirs from above until it is a single large stream pouring straight through our boundary.

326mm (about 11 inches) fell over 2 days. It was more or less stopped by 0600 on Saturday morning when we were due to set off to Nelson for my last day of in-house Pilates teaching training.  However State Highway 6 (to Nelson) was closed between Havelock and Pelorus Bridge and had been since 1900 the previous evening.  Some of our neighbours didn't get home last night and we met them coming in when we did eventually go out about 2 hours late - determined to try our luck.

In reality, although the road remained officially closed, we were able to navigate the flood damaged parts by following a pilot vehicle which was moving short convoys through a stretch of road littered with great slabs of asphalt - metres square - that had been lifted at the sides and washed/driven by the floods into the road centre.

I'm not sure what Mr B makes of all this... town boy moans about the distance, isolation,  and fragility of connections but then I overhear him relating it to friends or family in calls back to the old country and he makes it sound like pioneering adventure of which he is very proud.

All in a 'day in the life of' out here.

Audio:https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/B004EM9CWW?source_code=ORGOR69210072400FU  (in case you want to invest in Winnie-the-Pooh audio for yourself or someone you know. We have a "Pooh Story" at bedtime every Sunday evening - have done most of our years together - can pretty much recite them verbatim now but love the cast in this audio version.)