Editorial: All wet and pretty happy about it

Carrying an aluminum ladder about in a thunderstorm, I wondered whether I might die.

As I flopped through a puddle in my jandals toward a blocked gutter, it did not escape me that I was a mobile lightening rod.

Days earlier, I had ignored the advice of two persons who had independently observed "you need to clean out those gutters. Not ignored in the sense "yeah right, as if you know what you're talking about". More, "yeah, you're right, but it's not going to happen today".

Not until what felt like a month's worth of rain fell in 15 minutes on my quiet Sunday. Twice, maybe even three times.

The blocked gutters overflowed. The garage flooded.

I tried not to throw mud and rotten leaves onto my wife's head as she held the ladder while I reached up and blindly sloshed about in the gutter. I did not look too hard at the object which had a different texture and weight to the leaves and muck that I threw down, but I think it was was once alive. And I don't mean fruit.

On my hands and knees trying to unblock a stormwater drain, I tried not to swallow the muck that splashed up into my face. I ignored the clogged root system's disconcerting habit of of sucking back into the pipe, as if it did not want to come out.

In between unclogging gutters and downpipes, I swept water from the flooded garage, whooshing it out the door, parallel to the bunding of wet towels that was stopping the rainwater tide.

I left the light off in case the water from the dripping roof got into the wiring, and electrocuted me, poaching me vigorously in the puddles.

That is, if I survived frying myself out in the thunderstorm.

Back outside, dripping wet, I watched a thundershower pelt the roof of a house across the road, with barely a wet mist coming my way.

Later that night, as I clambered about in our ceiling, looking for the source of a leak, I couldn't help observe that I had enjoyed sloshing about in the rain more.

And as I showered the cobwebs and rash-inducing insulation fibres away, I couldn't help but reflect upon the merits of not putting off "til tomorrow" what can be done today.