journal-04/22/00

04/22/00

And the thunder rolls...

Granted, it's almost hard to hear and I've only heard it twice all night, but it's there.

I absolutely love thunderstorms. And there are so few of them here. This could be the third time I've heard thunder since I moved here over a year ago. Hmm.

Let's just count that as another thing I miss about Texas and the surrounding areas in the southern part of the US.. the thunderstorms. Lightning streaking across the sky, lighting up the night almost as if it's the middle of the afternoon for a flash of an instance... lightning bolts appearing an inch wide in the sky, so they must actually be several yards cross or even wider...

Thunder so loud you jump out of your skin, rumble so deep you feel it in your spine.

Once when I was a kid a lightning bolt struck the huge pecan tree in our front yard (the third time it was struck!). I was at home, sitting at the dining room table doing homework, when this orange light blinded my mom and me for several long seconds while we simultaneously heard the absolute loudest noise we'd ever heard in our lives. We rushed to the front window, we thought it was a transformer blowing out or something... until we saw the smoke rising from the pecan tree. At that time we had a yellow rose bush planted in a barrel beside the tree, and an off-shoot of the bolt hit that bush. We thought it died, and we thought for sure the pecan tree would die.

The pecan tree had a scar running down where the lightning bolt struck, but it didn't die, and over the years the scar completely faded away to a slight indentation in the bark, which you only noticed if you knew where the tree had been struck some years before...

And the bush... it actually mutated! Instead of occasional yellow roses with huge soft petals, we got (and still have, even though my parents moved they took that bush-turned-into-a-vine with them) a vine sort of thing that blooms tons of flowers at the same time, and the flowers look something like carnations and they're all different shades of pink. How strange is that?

In Texas rain is almost synonymous with thunder and lightning. Something I miss, definitely.

And to be honest, there's nothing quite like making love during a thunderstorm... the constant rumble and the occasional loud crackle mixed with the pouring rain, the lightning flashing in through the windows all adds a sort of mystery to the mood, and let's not even get started talking about how it affects the passion, the intensity...

*sigh*