The Storm

Today is too hot, too humid, too strange, too oppressive. Only the tropical can savor this wet hot air and be happy.

Even the children are languid.

The subtle breeze that brought this summer is gone. Misty fields of spring are now overgrown with the sizzle summer. The dull lushness of spreading crops, weeds, and strange dusty things in shades of green create a weird and colorful enigma. The cold winter wind is an impossible broken memory and the scent of autumn can’t wedge its way into the savage heart of this heat.

Clouds majestic mingle and meld in the sacrosanct blue that no one can touch. A rainbow is somewhere hidden and brief and crouching in its arch in the quivering roiling shreds of a storm close… but not nearby.

The summer and its warm days full of life for which I once pined is now too much. The heat is staggering and the day is oddly quiet, calm and still.

When I close my eyes I can picture the windmills of some Kansas farm gray and peeling stark against an intensely troubled sky. The “Wizard of Oz” comes to mind: Dorothy and Toto scampering down a broken dirt road racing home to see what was the matter with Auntie Em– only to find themselves too close to the bowels of a hungry and desperate tornado.

The sweat drips and the sky bubbles and cooks the clouds and boils them into a stew of trouble. The sky is boiling. It has become an undulating, foreboding pot, steaming and bubbling over with the potent and powerful and the miserable, fearful and weak. The teardrop blue, once succulent and sweet is devoured by a cindery-gray and black billowing miasma that spews forth from the dark raging sky.

And I watch in wonder.

A crackling flash erupts slashing upward so quickly that it breaks the air in two and forces it to explode, and the booming thunder rolls and echoes across the cowering landscape.  A crazed and cold inferno descends wildly toward the simmering earth and pushes thin columns of hot boiling air upward fueling this dark rebellion. Anarchy reigns across the heavens and is tossed turbulent in the black foam that is all that remains of the once blue summer sky.

Winds wild and willful whip the dust on the ground into devilish spirals of danger and the lightning cracks against the deep and mournful-gray of the sky.

Then comes the rain. Rain in torrents washes the heat and humidity from the air with its fearsome and relentless pounding. The riveting of hailstones pounding on the porch force me to seek a safer place. The seething angry wind rattles the windows and the livid rain seems to come from all around – from above and below and behind, borne and fed by the fury of the storm.

A bit of light rips through the dim, ragged coattails of the storm; the clear crystalline blue, like the sweet scent of passion, tears away at the retreating mass of the dense lifeless gray and ruins its once perfect terror.

A raincrow perched on a wire above the street coos and the air is cool and pleasant. The whimpering monster that moments ago ravaged the land below melts into the glowing sky now full and radiant glowing with sensual blues, oranges and reds.

A tranquil sunset.

Children play in rushing rivulets running and laughing along the edges of streets smooth and glistening with the cool flowing water. Children being children in the happy afterglow of the storm.

The scent of new honeysuckle now hovers and the mourning dove’s coos mingle with the sound of children splashing and laughing. The sanctity of serenity restored. The swirls of summer sublime.

The hot and steamy day has been transformed into a cool and dreamy summer night by a band of anarchical marauders that once flew high and mighty on the powerful but ephemeral wings.

The storm has passed.

Dreams dance on such soft and cool summer nights.