Their mother's paring knife. Speak with them some more and they'll tell you how they barely got out of their house. They'll say where they slept the first night of the flood. What they ate. Ask them what happened the next day or the day after.
Floods rob people of memories and leave terrible new memories in their place.
To know the power of the flood, walk the streets of Falmouth. On the north end of town, a railroad bridge runs over the normally lazy Licking River. It's an old bridge and its girders are covered by thick, black sheets of steel. A tree trunk juts from one of these sheets. Thrown by the flood it pierced the steel with the apparent ease of a pencil poked through a plastic cup.