Being a resident of south Florida, I’m pretty well acquainted with rain. Usually it’s the kind of drizzling, annoying, neverending rain that just messes up your windshield and never seems to let up for a minute. But last night it was a different kind of rain: Pouring, slamming, still unrelenting. All this was accompanied by a warlike atmosphere of constantly flickering lightning and crashing thunder. It went on all night.

This morning I wake up and it’s a bright sunny day. Okay, rain over. That wasn’t so bad. Until I got behind the wheel of my car, that is. The roads had turned into lakes! My typical route to work was actually completely closed off. After getting most of the way there, I had to double back, retrace 50% of my route, and then resume course on a different street. There’s a total lack of any interconnecting cross-streets in my town since almost every blessed one dead-ends in a gated community, so if one of the main arteries is out of commission, you’re gonna be recovering a lot of ground.

Fortunately, traffic was not a problem, and I got to work only about eight minutes later than usual. It just seems amusing, however, that one night of rain would decimate our roads—when after five straight days of rain this past summer, when everybody was talking about the city north of us flooding out of control, we had no ill effects whatsoever. Guess this is our payback.