Flood
- There is—you guessed it—a flood.
- Dillard's okay because she lives on high ground, but her friends the Bings, who live downstream, have a house full of water.
- Everybody's outside doing one of two things: trying to help, or capturing snapping turtles and prodding them with broomsticks. Granted, the people doing the latter are children.
- The Bings somehow manage to save both their house and their stuff.
- When Dillard hears shortly thereafter that they're cooking a giant mushroom, she imagines it grew on the back of their couch, although it actually grew outdoors, like mushrooms do.
- She imagines that nature gave them the mushroom as a consolation prize.
- Oh, and she ponders water creatures—specifically, how they survive when a flood washes everything away.
- You knew there had to be some pondering of plankton in all this.