Up, Up and Away!

One day last week Kim and I sat out on the patio for a late-afternoon chat. The sun was in our eyes, so we raised the big umbrella. For one reason or another, we went inside without closing the umbrella and didn't give it another thought before bedtime.

The next morning I opened the back door and noticed that the small clay pot Kim uses as an ashtray on the umbrella table had tipped over and spilled half a dozen cigarette butts on the concrete. I hurried to pick them up before the dogs could get them, thinking all the while that something else seemed wrong. It took a minute to realize that the umbrella was missing.

A quick look in the backyard and the side yard showed that the umbrella wasn't there. I walked the width of the house, not really thinking that the umbrella could have blown far enough to end up in the driveway, and indeed it wasn't there. I had a clear view of neighbors' yards all around, could have seen a big green umbrella if there'd been one in any of them, but there wasn't.

Kim woke up a few minutes later, and I asked her to look around outside and see if she could tell what was different. She didn't register the missing umbrella immediately, either. Once she did, she looked in all the same places I'd looked. We both laughed at the mental image of a huge umbrella floating off into space.

Kim got dressed and went out the front door to look some more. Minutes later she came in giggling and said she'd found the umbrella. I followed her out that way and didn't see any sign of it until she told me to look up.

This photo shows the green umbrella, lodged upside down in a niche of the roof between the front of my house and the rear of our rent house across the carport.












Here's where it started from:

Apparently, on an otherwise clear, calm night, there was one gust of wind that was strong enough to lift the umbrella and its weighted pole high enough to clear our rooftop. Gosh, I wish I'd seen it happen! What fun that would have been.