I live in Nashville now; I have for a long time. I started watching the rain on Saturday morning. It was coming down so hard it looked white. My husband and I stood at the front door with our very old dog and decided she’d have to wait until things eased up.

But they didn’t ease up. We canceled our plans for the day. Finally I put on my flip-flops, shorts and raincoat and took the dog out. I went down the street to walk my mother’s dog, then the dog of a friend who lives on a hill around the corner. The water was now up to my ankles, but it was mesmerizing, all that thunder and lightning. I went to see how high the nearby creek was. It was raging like an angry little river.

All night long the tornado sirens wailed, which in the South is a sound you get used to, like cicadas. The next morning when I again went to walk my mother’s dog, the water was up to my knees at points and I could barely see through the rain. My husband went off to walk our friend’s dog, but he couldn’t make it there on foot.

He picked me up in the car and we drove for 15 minutes, looping over higher streets to make it to her house, just a block away. Yesterday’s angry creek was now a torrent, leaping over the road and through the houses beside it. It would take just the slightest error in judgment to be swept away  though maybe fording floodwater to carry small dogs to higher ground to relieve themselves could also be called an error in judgment.

Three years ago we bought a small piece of land along the Cumberland, just off River Road on the way to Ashland City, not far from where I had lived as a child. We keep meaning to build a little house there, a single room with a wide porch where we might spend quiet weekends. We go out there some evenings to have a picnic or paddle around in a canoe. We like to visit with our neighbors.