Yesterday morning I just about called it. Rainy season had to be over. It never rains this intensely in March; the last one had to have been the last one.

Oh, but that was not the case. I headed to the grocery store with Naomi about 3:30pm and found myself driving straight toward this:

Unphased, I held to my earlier conviction until we were in the store and I heard the rain start to hit the tin roof. It was a gentle sound at first, and made me wish they would play “I miss the rains down in Africa” on the speaker system. I only had 2 minutes for such thoughts before it began to rain harder. And then another 2 minutes later it was raining so hard that the noise in the large, tin-roofed grocery store was deafening. Naomi had to shout in my ear to be heard.

The torrential rain lasted for more than an hour! It was so bad that they closed the big metal/security sliding doors of the store. In the picture below, the exit is about where you see the sign for #4 checkout stand. The big metal doors were closed for more than 45 minutes while shoppers who had finished filled the exit area, just waiting for a chance to get out!

Once we had found everything we needed, we roamed the store restlessly. At one point the power went off for 3-4 minutes. 😳 Naomi was getting tired and a little frightened by the whole experience. But eventually I saw that people were starting to leave and the metal doors were partway open.

I began to check out, at a cash register far from the exit. All of a sudden a man with an armload of groceries bolted from the furthest cash register and ran toward the exit. By the time he reached the exit, he was walking normally and the ladies at that furthest cash register were yelling and waving their arms. But there was nothing they could do. The man had stolen the groceries and the rain had drown all their cries to stop the thief. Even two lanes away from them, I couldn’t hear their cries of “thief!” But I had seen it and like those ladies the realization of what had happened came too late.

Naomi and I made our way quickly to the car in the heavy rain, and by the time I had loaded the groceries in the back I was soaked. The heat and humidity steamed up the car, and it was a while before I could see through the fogged up windows! As we headed through town, evidence of the storm was all around us. Traffic was terribly slow, signs were ripped and destroyed, branches lay on the road, and water rushed through the culverts.

Everyone was picking up the pieces and getting back to normal life.

As I neared our house, there were fewer and fewer signs of the storm. Matt’s report when we got home: just a few sprinkles but lots of thunder.

And so, I’m not going to call it today. Or tomorrow. Maybe my weather forecasting confidence will have returned by next week. But for the moment, I can honestly say that I have no idea when the rainy season will end this year! We’ll just enjoy the lush green tropics for as long as we can!