(I wrote this as show notes when I posted the video, a first for me here, and somehow it all just poof disappeared. So here is my best attempt at recreating!)
When I was little, during a big thunderstorm my dad would ask me if I wanted to watch the rain with him, and would take me onto our wide front porch and we would sit on a little wooden bench there and watch the rain pour down in sheets across our front yard, bodies shaking with every roll of thunder. I would snuggle into the safety of his body against mine and marvel. It was scary and exhilarating and a reminder of how small we all were- my little kids body and his grown up adult body- in the context of this world that sent water and lightning and sound to shake our house and the very earth itself.
My parents were both farmer’s kids, and my parents grew (and canned or froze) a year’s worth of vegetables every summer, so the connection between this powerful storm and the corn and peppers and green beans growing in my mom’s garden was also part of the experience.
My mom was the designated worrier in the family, and so she wasn’t a fan of these porch rain viewings in case lightning struck us I guess, or the overwhelming power of nature swept us up somehow, so she would occasionally poke her head out of the door and tell us to come in, but mostly my memories are of me and dad, cool and dry, wondering.
I live in a too big suburban house that also manages, through the vagaries of subdivision design, to allow everyone in the family to have their own designated space except for me-the girls have their bedrooms, my husband has his work from home office, the guest room is a makeshift office for me but not really mine- so I’ve claimed our back deck as my domain. When we first moved here I’d spend hours on the outdoor sofa, watching the wind move the trees and the giant sky of this new home of ours, and the resident hawk that gyred elegantly above it all. As time passed the hawk was joined by a baby, and then for a few months they circled together until one day it was just the mama hawk again, flying solo. Once about a year into our living here I saw a hawk that had been hit by a car, in the road about a quarter mile from ours, and grieved it like I’d lost a friend until my hawk showed back up a day or two later, circling.
I regularly invite my girls onto the deck with me when it is raining, both to enjoy the coolness of the air and to wonder at the power of the storms, and that’s where we were when I took this video a few days ago. I buried my father yesterday, and he was very much on my mind the afternoon of this storm as I snuggled their two growing but still small bodies into mine and felt the majesty of the water pouring down, thunder rumbling, lightning cracking.
