THE FLOOD

“What’s a flood?” Jenny asked Margaret.

“That’s when it rains so much that the water comes into people’s houses and drowns them. Sometimes it even washes the houses away.”

Jenny shuddered as she remembered the half grown chickens that had drowned in the ditch during the rain last week. Mother had gathered them up in a pail after the rain. They were limp and quiet, their eyes closed. Jenny remembered the smell of their wet feathers and how strange they looked with their feathers plastered down against their bodies. The word flood had sounded something like blood. Maybe the water was red, yes, that was it; the water was probably red like when you had a nosebleed, only lots more of it.

They were going to see the flood today. It was about twenty five or thirty miles away. The mid-summer rains had swollen the streams, and the normally placid river was out of its banks, flooding towns and streams along the way.

Mother packed a lunch in the picnic basket. She put in the thermos jug of cold water and a collapsible drinking cup. Jenny cried because they weren’t taking their own car. She hated to ride in other cars. They had a different smell, sound and feel. The seats were deeper and wider and made Jenny’s legs bulge where they touched the edge. She looked at her yellow anklets and the funny way her legs looked and wished for the familiarity of their own car. She liked it better when Daddy was driving, too.

They drove over miles of chalky white road. The men were talking about the flood. The man who was driving said, “I seen in the paper where there was a lady and a little girl floatin’ down the river. “

Water must have gotten pretty high and the current must have been pretty strong to have washed out that big Franklin bridge,” said Daddy.

Someone else mentioned hearing about a man and a woman who had ridden downstream on the roof of their house.


At last they parked the car on the roadside and got out and walked around. They saw the muddy water which stretched as far as they could see on the north and west. Jenny looked for the lady and the little girl, but all she could see was an old tub and a tree branch floating lazily along. There was so much water. It looked shiny and silvery from a distance. It wasn’t red as Jenny had imagined. Jenny held tightly to Mother’s hand.

“Mother, I don’t see them,” she said timidly.

“You don’t see who?”

“The lady and the little girl.”

“You won’t see them. They wouldn’t be here any more. Besides, it was probably just a rumor. It didn’t say anything about this in the newspaper.”

After looking at the flood ravaged countryside, they ate a picnic lunch on a grassy little hill near their car and the cars of the other families that had come to see the flood. She enjoyed eating her bologna sandwich from the cloth on the grass. She took a cool drink of water from the magic cup that opened out into a full sized cup. As they drove home away from the flood she was happy to be away from the overwhelming expanse of water to where there were just trees and fields and houses.