Summer Showers

It has been a dry summer.

Oh, they often claim to see "scattered showers and thunderstorms" rolling through- it is the normal forecast, along with "mostly sunny." We hear it so often, and yet see so few of those scattered showers, we now simply glance over the forecast. It's like in Washington, you just expect that most days it might rain. Or be overcast. This summer, you could just expect you would need your watering hose- it was going to be painfully dry today.

So when we heard the same forecast one night two weeks ago, we went to bed, not thinking anything of it. Until 4am, when we were awakened by a "CRRRACK!"

I awakened to a startling peal of thunder that sounded like it was right outside the window. Rain was pouring down outside -the gutters, too full to handle the onslaught, overflowed and water poured from every direction.

Lightning back here is incredible. When we first moved to Iowa, we would get so excited about a storm, watching it move in over the countryside. Far off in the distance we could see lightning that we could not yet hear, and watch the bolts shoot down or sideways through the clouds. I have always loved storms growing up, and these have just been supersized versions of those I expierenced in my youth.

There are storms you watch from the front room, where the windows cover two walls and you can see far across the landscape. But this was not one of those storms. Not at 4am when it was pounding on our roof and ripping through our sky. This was the kind of storm where you sit in an interior room, positive that if you get any closer to the window one of the thousands of lightning bolts will just shoot right in for lack of other places to go.

Our power went out before we woke up, and with such a racket going on outside, we had no way of going back to sleep. Though I could be confident we had no real emergency (tornado, etc), there is just something frightening about lightning hitting your front yard. It's just too close for comfort. Each time I would lull myself to sleep, reminding myself how safe I was in our brick home, I would hear another loud "CRACK". It just wasn't going to happen.

Though we had no flashlight, we were able to easily maneuver down the stairs using the constant strobe-light effect of the lightning outside. It's hard to even believe - but for two hours we sat, feeling as if we were in the middle of a carnival ride where the strobe lights flash on, and then pause for a split second, and then flash again to taunt the young riders.

When morning broke through, the we went outside, breathing in the wonderful freshness rain brings. We called the power company, who eventually found that we had blown a transformer. (Thankfully, we were able to get power back around noon, after they tracked down a new one.) As I watched the day begin to brighten, it struck me how tender and innocent the line of storms looks. Fluffy white clouds nestled along the bottom of a deep blue sky - letting on nothing of the fury raging within.

"Scattered showers and thunderstorms" seemed to be just a bit too mundane to describe this one. Of course, Ryan slept through it all.