We’re starting to get the feel of the deeper meaning of the word “monsoon.”  

It’s not just rain, or driving rain, or pouring rain, or heavy rain. 

It’s more like a windy warning, then a deafening crack of thunder and the universe flushes the toilet on an entire continent.

Okay, not an entire continent all at once, but a pretty wide swath, I think we can agree on that.

The whirling vortex of water runs down every sidewalk ankle deep, carrying with it the detritus of the day, week, month, heck, probably the whole last year since the previous monsoon. Water pours off of leaves like a faucet left on by a hasty child. Tree trunks run with water like those fancy “wet walls” in four star hotels. Plumeria flowers float like mythical fairy boats through muddy canals littered with plastic bags and empty water bottles, chip wrappers and the occasional mislaid flip flop sandal.

The boys are learning, even if I am not, to turn up for our walk to lunch in their rain coats with hoods up and cinched down tight around their ears. 

It’s less than a quarter mile’s walk to our lunch spot but we arrived looking like refugees who’d trudged through the rainforest all the way from Hanoi, overland. The gracious ladies, magically pristine, without a smudge to their eye makeup seated us and kindly didn’t laugh in front of us. 

Noon is high tide. The beach that is wide and wonderful at dinner hour and dotted with children playing and kite surfers performing acrobatically for our enjoyment pounded hard at the edge of the restaurant while the wind blew the rain hard into the open building, pelting us with spray a good twenty feet inside the enclosure. A little boy ran around with his mother’s sarong tied about his head like a muslim lady, trailing it’s hem in the dirt pretending to fly. A dog tried to take refuge under our table. The kids kept their raincoats on. I was cold. 

It’s hard enough to order in English, when we should be speaking Thai, on any given day,  but the roar of the sea and the wind made it almost impossible. 

When I say it was windy, I do mean WINDY.

• The kind of wind that would cause the entire state of Florida to board up it’s windows and call it a hurricane. 
• The kind of wind that you see on the news with reporters clinging to a light pole and shouting into a wet microphone to report on. 
• The kind of wind that blows pieces of trees right by you. That kind of wind.

Thai women are tiny. Child sized by our cultural norms. When our waitress (pristine hair and makeup) decided to baton down the hatches further and lower the beach side plastic the rest of the way down we watched with interest, and a little concern. No one else seemed worried. Surely she was fine, this is all normal here, right? We’re the ones who aren’t used to it. 

And then, she was shrieking in Thai; the wind had squashed her between the plastic covering and some tables and she was stuck, wet and hollering. The kitchen staff came running, Tony hopped up to hold back the sheet until she could wiggle out and then she headed outside to tie the last thing down.

The girl who returned in no way resembled the girl who went out.

Imagine hitting a bullseye on a dunk tank and dropping the clown into six feet of cold water. That was her. Clown makeup smeared from eyes to chin, hair in a hurricane up-do and drenched. She was out less than thirty seconds. 

The kitchen staff conferred and then came to move our table. Evidently it was important to protect the farang from any further monsoon related mishaps. “This rain, this wind… this is normal?” I asked one lady. “Okay, okay… this is normal… no problem,” she smiled in response. The Thais always smile in response. 

“I’m glad we picked the concrete building to have lunch in today,” I whispered to Tony.  

The kids, as always, were oblivious. Happily chatting about other rain we’ve lived through and chair dancing to the Lady Ga Ga song throbbing from some unseen stereo. I kept one eye on the wind and the tree parts blowing down the street and the other eye on the reflective framed print of the god Ganesha, wondering if perhaps I should make an offering of peanuts or something to his elephant self in hopes of making it home without one of my children blowing away into the sea.