When the Flood Comes
Remembering how to build a life on the edge of the river
Water has flooded our home.
Pouring through the ceiling beams. Seeping into our possessions. Finding the cracks. Exploiting the seams. Saturating a life that felt safe.
When the unexpected occurs, life is stripped of the mundane—the shit we complain about: the groceries still in their bags, the laundry left unfolded, the dishes waiting for soap. The life quietly happening in the background… drowns.
The flood washed away any lingering illusions I had about safety—about how we build our homes, and what we believe protects us.
Instead, the water revealed the truth of what we live with.
The toxic pink cotton candy stuffed into our ceilings. Drywall giving way to fiberglass. Life zipped beneath wall-to-wall plastic sheeting—a Dexter-like containment of the poisons we’ve normalized.
Walking through the plastic, breathing in God-knows-what kind of chemical dust, I felt overwhelmed. And I found myself longing for walls made of earth, and straw, and sand—the kind of clay you can press your hands into. I craved the scent of soil and lime, instead of bleach and formaldehyde.
There’s something deeply wrong with a system where cleanup requires hazmat suits. And yet here we are—zipped behind plastic, calling it restoration.
The flood came.
And now, here I am—longing for the mundane, longing for clay walls, longing for something it feels like I lost.
The twist?
The water came because we installed solar panels. My attempt to “do good” was met with biblical backlash. Apparently, this kind of failure is shockingly common.
Cue the irony. Cue the documentary pitch. Working title: The Cost of Clean.
Their crew drilled haphazardly into the roof—missing beams, puncturing shingles, setting a timer on a ticking time bomb. One that went click, click, BOOM the morning of January 1st.
Not on our vision board for the new year.
