Of late, I’ve been pining for a storm.
No, not of the wind or the rain variety. Not of unseasonal hail.
Of late, I’ve been pining for a good old-fashioned barn burner of a summertime electrical storm. The kind that sends dogs skittering under the chesterfield. The kind that rattles folks from the deepest of slumbers. The kind where bolts streak across the sky, and the night crashes and rumbles and booms.
The kind that draws you to the window, where you watch in utter awe.
The kind that seized our attention, oh, a couple of years back when we were visiting the Eastern relatives.
We were sitting on the cottage’s screened-in porch in the mid-afternoon when the clouds turned from white to black in a matter of minutes.
The wind gusted up, sending early autumn leaves dancing across the grass. The rain started slowly, then picked up power and began to pound so hard we could scarcely hear each other speak.
The flashes were epic, and so was the noise.
“Do you think we’ll have one?” I asked the husband the other day. “A storm? With thunder and lightning?”
I was hopeful.
“Maybe,” said the husband.
It was late afternoon and we were on the porch — the non-screened porch — and we’d noticed that the day had turned. Hours earlier, it has been a shorts-and-T-shirt kind of day, but that was no longer the case. We’d changed into sweats and hoodies. We’d found ourselves pulling blankets around our shoulders.
We noticed that the gusts were starting to shake the trees, and that the clouds were darkening and skidding across the sky.
We sat and we waited. The rain arrived. The wind picked up. But that was it.
The Eastern relatives, meantime, were no doubt at the cottage, perhaps driven indoors on account of the weather. The sky would be roaring and the lightning would flash, but they’d probably pay scant attention, and focus on Rummoli instead of the storm.
Familiarity will do that.
Me? I’m pining for a good old summer storm, the likes of which I rarely see.
Give me the sand and the sunshine and all. But I’d love all the noisy stuff too.
