Too Wet for Words

This bucolic yard scene doesn't tell the tale. But sitting on the dock in lawn chairs after days of torrential rain we watch tiny bass swim over our feet. The dock's under water. And this was the dock that the builder said was built for the Unsinkable Molly Brown. Now it's sunk. The shell road in front of our house is once again a highway for fish. Our neighbor says there's a bunyip in our pond. That's a mythological Australian monster. In reality there was a bunyip in our toilet and another one in our shower. I am not not kidding. I pulled one gorgon head out of the toilet line and another out of the shower drainage pipe. Each head was thick, ugly, knotted and large, and I had to pull hard to get it out. Each grew from the water-greedy, succubus root of a shefflera tree. No bunyip this -- but monster, yes! Indeed. And more to come -- cockroaches galore hunting for dry land. Giant toads hunting for cockroaches. Bee eating Cuban tree frogs gobbling African bees.
Paperwood trees unpeeling their scrolls of white newspaper bark. Acacia trees drooping to the pond's edge covered in bright yellow blossoms. Dark tannic water, the color of molasses. Thomas Edison's banyan tree  shrouded in green fox grape vines. (Yes, lightbulb man actually planted it and the one who built our house took a cutting and it has grown taller than our roof.) The yellow-crowned night heron tree is bowing into the tannins, the bees are whistling Dixie, the alamanda bush is popping purple fuses, and everything's out of control too wet for words.