I have to share this story with my dedicated readers. It has nothing to do with stars, but it does have to do with the Atmosphere.

I will write about stars again in the near future, the Dan Fogelberg and the Beach Boys stories still deserve their turn.

I am living in the Pacific Northwest, and we are in the midst of what is called an Atmospheric River. Other terms for this weather event range from tropical connection to water vapor surge to my favorite one, the Pineapple Express.

A few years ago, Dec of 2019 to be exact, I was visiting my middle kid and her family in Seattle when they had a similar weather event. Em had dropped me off at the Amtrak station for my return to Portland. I have been using the Amtrak for years to make the trip from the Oregon kids to the Seattle ones.

After waiting in my seat for about 25 minutes for the trip to start, the conductor announced that the train would not be going to Portland for at least a week. The train tracks had washed away due to a mudslide. Mudslides that flow from a volcano are called lahars. This was technically not a lahar, but it was a violent mudslide that caused destruction to anything in its way. It was laharish.

I called Em and she very carefully navigated her back through the very flooded streets to pick me up. The highways and the airport were also heavily impacted by the wettest day in Seattle in the past 10 years and the most rain recorded for December 20 since record-keeping began at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in 1945. The airport was closed. Highways were shut down.

Bonus – I got to stay a few extra days and ended up flying back to Portland.

So today in Oregon, we are experiencing an Atmospheric weather event. The wind was strong enough to knock out power to parts of Portland. (I have power so I can still try to post this piece.)

The downpour has lessened so I quickly went outside onto my front porch to collect some things that had not been secured enough and were blowing around.

As I approached my door to head back inside, I saw something odd on the glass portion of the door. There were of few of these odd-looking things. I carefully picked one up and looked closely at it.

They were worms. Small earthworms. It has rained so much while the wind was blowing so hard, is it possible it blew the worms up 5 feet onto the glass part of my door?

I have heard of frog rain. It is another meteorological expression. Poor innocent frogs get swept up in a storm and get blown miles away and fall from the sky when the clouds release their moisture.

Well, either this is a new version of that, with worms falling from the sky or was it that I just had some very smart worms trying to come inside to wait out this Atmospheric River with me. Or maybe they recognized a safe place to escape.

I have new respect for worms.