Weathering the Storm — A Memory
How Times Change…
There are a lot of humorous — and not so humorous — writing and video shorts about how Gen-X children were often just left alone to figure out life for themselves.
I suppose much of it is an exaggerated caricature, but from my current age and looking back maybe not everything was as much of a caricature as social media makes it out to be.
Earlier today I got to thinking about this particular assertion after having watched a a couple of pretty funny — but totally on-point — Gen-X reels on YouTube... which made me remember one particular incident that seems pretty extreme, at least by 2026 standards.
When I was 14 we were living in the south of Spain, and I remember this one time my parents decided that it was time for a quick vacation break to neighboring Portugal.
But since I was in school, they felt it was OK for me (as a 14-year old) to stay home and manage my life and the household while they were gone for five days + travel time.
Which was actually fine by me because I pretty much kept to myself anyway, and getting up in the morning and walking to the main road where the school bus stopped was not a particular challenge since... well, I did it every day anyway since my parents were rarely upright and conscious before 9:00am.
I think we may have gotten about three days into their absence — they would drive over to Portugal, which was an all day affair and then drive back which of course was also an all day affair — when I found myself walking the 10 minutes home from the school bus and noticed that the sky was a very strange color of dark gray and there was what looked like "wall" of clouds approaching from the west.
Even though it was late fall, it was pretty unusual to see something like that in a place where the weather was normally quite mild and sunny most of the time. I didn't think that much of it but I hurried home and made it just before it started raining.
And then the rain got heavier and heavier and suddenly the wind got super strong and very "loud." Within a few minutes the rain turned to hail and because of the strength of the wind it started beating against the west facing windows.
That was enough to really get my attention and I thought to myself "OK, this seems a bit hazardous" so I ran around the house dropped all the rolling shutters on west facing windows because it seemed like they might break in the wind and hail. Mostly, I was motivated by not wanting to get yelled at for broken windows while the parents were away!
I barely managed to finish that when I noticed an unusual "roaring" sound, and I realized that the road behind the house to the north — which was actually where our parking area was; we didn't really have a driveway — had turned into pretty much a raging river of knee deep water which was rapidly approaching the step up by the front door. In fact, it seemed to be rising so fast that it was going to come in the house in a matter of minutes if the rain kept going...
I don't know how I managed to think this through in the brief time I had available — keeping in mind also that I was only 14 — but I realized that I had no way of stopping that water once it came up to the front door... it would just come in the house and start flooding things. Unless...
Thankfully we had stone floors but I still ran through and picked up the rugs in the entryway and then in the living room and threw them up on the guest room bed... and then grabbed all the bath towels I could locate, as well as several blankets. Then I literally built myself a blanket and towel berm about the width of the front door, leading from the front door, through the entryway, and about the 20 feet through the living room to the sliding door that led out onto our back terrace.
The water did keep rising a little more and yes, it started to enter the house. It started as a trickle, but for about 10 minutes we actually had a small "stream" — which got to be up to about an inch inche deep — running through the house from the front door and out the terrace door, contained by my channel of towels and blankets.
Thankfully, because those doors were facing north and south, I was able to wedge both the front and back doors open enough to not only let the water run through but also to let the air pressure from the storm equalize enough that none of the windows blew in.
After 15-20 minutes the rain tapered off, the water stopped flowing through the house, and I was able to throw the soaked towels outside, mop the floors and close the doors back up without any damage having happened to furniture or carpets in the house. Later that day I ran the dirty towels and blankets through our washer and hung them out to dry and it was pretty much like nothing had happened once I had replaced the couple of rugs I had picked up.
Except it wasn't as if nothing had happened because the evidence was that all the west facing walls — which were covered with the white stucco like most Spanish houses of the time — you could see how the hail had literally beaten the paint off the brick walls through to underlying the cement and in places through to the brick.
We learned later that the winds that day had locally been up to 110 km/h (70 mph) with higher gusts locally!
When my parents returned I calmly explained to them what had happened, showing them the stripped paint and they weren't even particularly alarmed; they just "knew that they'd left the house in good hands" and they were glad that no damage had been done.
The thing that strikes me as I look back about it is the nonchalance with which the whole thing was handled. But it was pretty typical of growing up in a household where you were expected to be pretty much "an adult" from about age 10...
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week ahead!
Comments, feedback and other engagement is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!
Greetings bloggers and social content creators! This article was created via PeakD, a blogging application that's part of the Hive Social Content Experience. If you're a blogger, writer, poet, artist, vlogger, musician or other creative content wizard, come join us! Hive is a little "different" because it's not run by a "company;" it operates via the consensus of its users and your content can't be banned, censored, taken down or demonetized. And that COUNTS for something, in these uncertain times! So if you're ready for the next generation of social content where YOU retain ownership and control, come by and learn about Hive and make an account!
As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly and uniquely for this platform — not posted anywhere else.
2026.10.05 02:17 PDT
1666/2932
