Summer thunderstorms
While the coasts have many advantages, there is one thing you just can't get in Oregon or California that comes every year to Midwest states: warm summer rainstorms. On the coasts, all our rain is cold.
The rain is pouring down outside, here in Illinois, and the clouds are racing across the sky. Thunder booms overhead and the prairie grass flattens down under the weight of the water. This is a necessary rain; the level of the pond was sinking and the fruit trees were getting dry.
When I stepped out onto the porch, I could feel the air cling, moist and electric. It made me want to leave work and just run right out into it, get soaked. I had a conference call, and I'm getting over a cold, so I prudently came back in instead, but there's something intoxicating about a summer storm.
One of my favorite memories is, cheesily enough, of dancing in a rain a little like this. The rain was sheeting down, until it didn't feel like drops anymore but like a constant stream. It made it almost hard to breathe; it felt like I might drown standing up, if the lightning didn't get me first. And the night was warmer than this, or at least, that's what I remember; memory may have romanticized it all a bit, though I did a fair job of romanticizing things in the moment at the time.
I was seventeen and on my own in the People's Republic of China. I'd gone up to the rooftop of my dormitory with some friends to marvel at the storm, but they were from Minnesota and so it was only a few degrees off familiar for them; they left me there after ten minutes or so. I stayed for more than an hour, ten stories up in the dark, twirling and leaping (gracelessly, if empirical observation tells us anything) and laughing like a loon, all by myself in that crazy warm torrential downpour. I swear I've never felt closer to God.
Um, that's sort of embarrassing to admit.
Though, you know, it's sad how the slow (very slow in my case, my partner would tell you) encroachment of propriety and taste robs us of some of the more cheesy or ridiculous enjoyments in life. There is really no way to pretend that one has danced ecstatically in the rain with any level of irony or detachment. Good thing I got it in early, then, before I got all Gen-X self-conscious about such things. Because really, I wouldn't give up the memory of that night for the world.
The rain is pouring down outside, here in Illinois, and the clouds are racing across the sky. Thunder booms overhead and the prairie grass flattens down under the weight of the water. This is a necessary rain; the level of the pond was sinking and the fruit trees were getting dry.
When I stepped out onto the porch, I could feel the air cling, moist and electric. It made me want to leave work and just run right out into it, get soaked. I had a conference call, and I'm getting over a cold, so I prudently came back in instead, but there's something intoxicating about a summer storm.
One of my favorite memories is, cheesily enough, of dancing in a rain a little like this. The rain was sheeting down, until it didn't feel like drops anymore but like a constant stream. It made it almost hard to breathe; it felt like I might drown standing up, if the lightning didn't get me first. And the night was warmer than this, or at least, that's what I remember; memory may have romanticized it all a bit, though I did a fair job of romanticizing things in the moment at the time.
I was seventeen and on my own in the People's Republic of China. I'd gone up to the rooftop of my dormitory with some friends to marvel at the storm, but they were from Minnesota and so it was only a few degrees off familiar for them; they left me there after ten minutes or so. I stayed for more than an hour, ten stories up in the dark, twirling and leaping (gracelessly, if empirical observation tells us anything) and laughing like a loon, all by myself in that crazy warm torrential downpour. I swear I've never felt closer to God.
Um, that's sort of embarrassing to admit.
Though, you know, it's sad how the slow (very slow in my case, my partner would tell you) encroachment of propriety and taste robs us of some of the more cheesy or ridiculous enjoyments in life. There is really no way to pretend that one has danced ecstatically in the rain with any level of irony or detachment. Good thing I got it in early, then, before I got all Gen-X self-conscious about such things. Because really, I wouldn't give up the memory of that night for the world.
posted by The Stute Fish at 08:56
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