Words + Images

I don’t think the wind and rain this morning really constitutes a storm, per se, but there is a ruggedness to the weather that makes me reminisce about a younger me who would relish dashing outside, however briefly, to experience a summer storm. Not so much now. I am wrapped in a thick sweater, sipping hot coffee, and tempted to slip back under the covers where a sleepy Steve still resides. I’ll wake him in a bit because he has a calvacade of people coming through today, friends, family, tai chi teachers and so on. Meanwhile I share a poem I wrote, way back when, all the way back in 2010, about the storms of my youth in Virginia.

Summer Storms

The food I’ve purchased and brought North with me. 

But the weather I could not carry in a cardboard box.

So when people ask  what I miss, that is what I tell them,

I miss most the southern summer storm.

You know the ones,

the ones with rolling thunder trailing white lightening in their wake.

Sheets of rain falling like milk from the sky. 

Such deafening noise and blinding light.

Children trembling as we peered past drawn curtains.

Unending it seemed but then poof! 

Like magic it would stop, leaving silence in the air. 

Darkness would part for the sun.  Birds sang.

All that remained of the storm would be puddles

and leaves strewn across the front porch.

We’d step outside into a golden light. 

God had scrubbed the world clean.

Just for us, you know, so that we could play. 

And play we did until the sun set

and the lightening bugs came out and danced with the stars. 

We would sit in the damp

winding down from another day well done. 

That is why I miss the summer storm.

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