When it rains, it pours....and pours and pours and pours.
This past week-end I was inundated with rain. thunder, lightning, wind, small hail, tornado watches and warnings and all of that other weather related stuff.
Usually I don't mind the rain. A soft drizzle on a cloudy day makes for a good excuse to curl up with a book or watch an old black and white movie on tv,but this past week-end it was a driving rain. It seemed to never stop.
Friday night it rained hard, it had thundered and flashed lightning all evening....when I heard it.. That unmistakable crack and boom that makes you sit straight up and just know something was hit by lightning. I even thought a tree fell on the house it was so loud. The next day I couldn't see any damage though, but I know somewhere it struck, I just couldn't see it. My eyes automatically were drawn to a tree in my front yard. It's a beautiful tree, a walnut tree, so straight and branched perfectly. It's still what I consider a rather young tree even though it's circumference must be close to 20 inches. It's not the biggest tree, nor the tallest, but it was the most perfect in form. Or it use to be. A couple of years ago it was struck by lightning. They say lightning never strikes twice, but I am not so sure. My tree has a huge running gash down the East side of it where the bark has pulled away from being struck. On the West side of the tree is another long running gash in the bark from either the same lightning bolt or from being struck twice. I half way expected to find another long gash of peeled away bark evidence of another strike...but I didn't. Lightning struck somewhere but this time it took pity on my tree. The tree still leafs out, casts shade, produces walnuts, and even with it's scars it's a beautiful tree.
Saturday evening brought more wind, lots of wind along with the rain. Tornado warnings trickled across the tv screen all night. I watched the skies, and I listened for the sound of a train. Tornados do sound like a train, well except without the blowing whistle. Last year at about this time I was watching the skies out my back door for any sign of a tornado. The wind was whipping about, first from one direction and then the other. You couldn't tell which way the rain was coming from it seemed to come from everywhere...and then it was calm. The whole time I had stood in the doorway, looking out in the backyard and just watching and feeling the power of the wind. It wasn't till the next day I had found out there was a tornado less than a mile from me. If I had been watching out my front door instead of the back, I would have most likely seen it. The irony wasn't lost on me that I should have been looking forward instead of backwards. You miss everything not looking ahead...
Sunday brought more rain, in some areas over seven inches of rain. It was flooding. Some roads were closed. Huge puddles were forming everywhere. My box of tomato plants almost seemed to sigh as they pressed against the patio door waiting to be planted yet. I sighed too. It would storm and then start to clear and then cloud up and storm again. Any hopes I had of logging on-line would be nixed with more thunder and lightning. After numerous false hopes and some nail biting when my server was down for a bit,... I logged on. The first thing I did was fire off an e-mail to my chat friend Randy to check to see if he was okay in Kansas.
My week-end of storms seemed so small after hearing and seeing so much of the desolation from a tornado that hit that tiny Kansas town of Greensburg. My week-end of inconvenience didn't seem quite so inconvenient any more.
I'm still here. My house is still here....and my lightning scarred tree is still here....and we are both doing just fine.
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