Wild Weather

The family that storm watches together, stays together. In our family there's no activity we love more than to sit in front of the Weather Channel and watch the storms approach, then when they get to us, stand on the porch or just inside the door to watch the lightning and the wind and lately, the hail. (The hail being reason not to stand on the porch under the awning)

Most of the storms occur while the girls are already in bed, but sometimes its an event as monumental as a TV special and they get to stay up a little bit longer than usual.

We are a family of storm nuts. Both my husband and I have had youthful dreams of being tornado chasers such as in the movie Twister. We both are never so much in awe as when viewing an old fashioned, cracks of thunder to shake the house thunderstorm.

This last week or so, we've been in heaven. A few days ago after the girls had just gone to bed and a storm was rolling in, we sat out on the hammock watching the lightning get closer and had to sprint for the door when the dime sized hail started slamming down. Now dime sized doesn't sound big for hail when we've all heard of the golf ball sized variety. Granted it can be considered a wimps hail, but any hail bigger than a snowflake never just falls, it plummets, it slams, it wails down like a pebble out of a slingshot, it stings. It hurts.

Then as we stood under the awning of the porch wincing at each pinging thud of hail on the metal overhang, we were privileged to witness some of the most spectacular streaks of lightning that I've ever seen. I mourned the fact that I had no film for my camera (as if the self-focus, drop loaded idiot camera I have could have caught any of it anyway, it was still worth the attempt.)

Several days later which brings us to this morning of the day I write this (a little calendar-math problem for you fellow weather watchers.) The thunderstorm rolled in in the wee hours of the morning, just about dawn. I woke to the clap of thunder (contented sigh, if I have to be shaken from my dreams it had better be for sex or thunderstorms.) A few rumbles later, my eldest daughter also made her way downstairs and instinctively to the window. We stood and watched the lightning, counted to the thunder, and talked.. all before the day officially began. Moments like that are rare, we have to stop for them, let them stretch on without interruption.

Weather has always marked moments in my life, or at least added a flavorful depth to them. When I was 9 my parents took us cross country in a van for the entire summer. I played in a large deep patch of snow on a 90 degree day off the side of the road somewhere in Colorado. I watched in wonder with head craned up as a line of rain swept down a mountain to whoosh wetness from one side of our tent to the other in the blink of an eye. I've pressed my face against the van window while my father floored it to go 5 miles an hour against a tornadic wind on some small Midwestern highway. It was just one summer, we returned. I've skated on Lake Plymouth with a bed sheet for a sail during a blizzard. I've played dodge the tree with my cousins in my grandmothers backyard during Hurricane Gloria. I've roller skated on the porch during old fashioned New England thunderstorms. I've spent and still do spend many a 5am walking barefoot through wet summer grass after thunderstorms. My eldest daughter was born during the dog days of August when the air was too still to move through and my younger daughter entered the world amid a tornado warning two years ago, I think we can all at least vaguely recall that series of storms.

Its hard to tell sometimes whether we remember the weather because of the events, or if we remember the events more vividly because of the weather. I don't think that point really matters. The two go hand in hand, weather can render vivid forever our joys, our tragedies, our still moments of personal wonder and our instances of connection. Like a bolt of lightning on our memory, its there, revel in it.