Thunder

Wow.

We just had what ought to be a mid-summer thunderstorm roll through after the boys and my mom were in bed. The wife and I were down on the couch watching a tape of our guilty pleasure, Jay Leno’s Headlines, as the storm started. Quietly, at first – the rumble of distant thunder, indistinguishable from the rumble of the washing machine in the basement.

As the storm rolled through, the lightning grew brighter, the “one-mississippi, two-mississippi, three-mississippi…” between the flash and the thunder became a “one-mississ..”. We turned off the TV because we couldn’t hear it over the rain. Buckets, I tell you. Buckets. We stood in the front doorway watching the rain and the thunder and the lightning close but not touching. I could smell her hair over the ozone and the wet earth, and feel her warm and near in the cool of the storm.

Then, like that, it was over. The flashes moved back into the forest, the rain stopped, and there was nothing but the dripping from the trees, the still of a summer night, and the woman I love, just like so many summer storms before.