Day of the storm

My mom asked me and Jaime to run to the store to grab a couple of groceries. It had been raining outside for a couple of minutes, but we saw that it was just a drizzle and figured that it would pass quickly like most rain does in Arizona; comes and goes within three to five minutes (fucking desert).

We got in the car en route to Walgreen's, through the drizzle and the wetness and then, I swear, we just drove straight under a massive, gloomy ass rain cloud. It was raining really hard under this rain cloud, as if we had driven our car beneath a waterfall. We rounded the corner onto Main Street and the wind picked up. It started blowing the rain into big sheets of water that dashed across the street in a diagonal pattern.

A little further down Main Street, we came across was a rather large tree branch in the middle of the road and Jaime drove around it. At that point we realized that we had to stop driving because we couldn't see past the hood of our car; it was grey with rain all around us. There was a car behind us that was only visible by it's foggy headlights. We were worried that it wouldn't see us as we had to come to a near halt.

Jaime parked behind the Jack-in-the-Box on Main and Recker and it shielded us from the wind which had picked up quite a bit. At some point the wind changed directions and started lashing at our car and I could feel the slow motion of the car rocking back and forth. We looked around and noticed that the streets were beginning to flood. Though, this is common in Arizona as we do not have a proper drainage system so we weren't to worried about the streets. It was the intense wind and fogged view of the road that hindered our ability to just round the block and drive home.

Just then, me and Jaime watched the power go out to the entire block and all the lights went out in sequence. That's when we started getting scared. We didn't know what to do and Jaime started to get mad, saying "why are we out here, we should've just stayed home." I was agitated at that fact because getting mad was only counterproductive to the whole situation.

We decided {after a small tiff} that we should just go home and try to drive the few blocks back to my house. Slowly, we navigated through the ponds and branches that were the street and blew through a "No Turn On Red" sign, because that is what you do when you are in an emergency. You follow a new code of ethics called Whatever the Hell You Must Do.

On the way home we saw cars parked on the side of the road with their hazard lights on. We saw a quarter of the roof of a trailer home leaning up against a tall cactus. How the hell it got there, I do not know. However long the drive, we made it home safe. The only damage that it did to our house was that it knocked over a small tree that had been dead in our backyard since before I moved here. It was a nice dead tree though and we had hung bird feeders from it.

And we never did go to Walgreen's.