Evening Storm

The weather was oppressively hot yesterday. The rain began sometime after 9:30 p.m. My Grandmother Dunn would have said it was teeming. The rain came down in sheets, streaming down under the street light. and bouncing back up from the darkened street under that pool of light. I confess to loving a good ole thunder storm. I shut off the porch light and sat in an old fashioned black rocker as the light show began.

The dark sky had a slight orange cast from the city lights bouncing against the cloud cover, until flashes of lightening illuminated the night sky blue white. Fireflies swooped to shelter under the roof of my front porch. Bioluminescence they call it. I call it a miracle. They winked and danced under the eaves, glad to be in from the rain. I rocked with my hands on the broad painted arms of the chair.

The temperature dropped at least 15 degrees and a breeze hit my bare legs, rocking back and forth. The old live oak across the street swayed its branches just a bit. The tree has no plans to go anywhere. Nearly a hundred years of rain and thunder have raged around that tree and yet it stands.

Cars wooshed by on the rain soaked street and I kept rocking. My Grandmother Galvin's sleeping porch would have been an ideal spot last night with huge old-fashioned glass windows which pulled away from the screens entirely and hooked to the ceiling. The result was a screened in porch to sleep in up on the second floor under the trees. I longed to drag a mattress downstairs so I could sleep on the front porch listening to the falling rain all night long. But that would be too weird even for me.