Storms

Posted on 12 May 2010

I tell everyone I hate storms. I’ve said it so long I accept it as truth, and feel my stomach grip with fear when trees bend and thunder hurtles through my chest.

But today, forced to enter the thrall to rescue a mini-vehicle my husband bought, for too dear a price, for our sons, I remembered a time I couldn’t imagine tornadoes and hail come to batter me and steal my body from earth.

This one today was so warm. The rain had moved humidity from something cloying to something pouring over me and clearing the air. I remembered waiting for storms like this on the hot Virginia summer days; waiting for a break in the heat, for an excuse to be soaking wet in my clothes in public, which is the most delicious feeling. It washes away the sweat that won’t evaporate from skin into the thick air, and helps me understand immersion baptism as a way to holiness. Heavy rain makes the hard, clay dirt around here something soft and luscious on bare feet, if you can stand the color. It makes the grass feel like clouds.

Then I remember Roger, who is so long dead, his ashes washing ever deeper into the ground up in the mountains I think I might never find him again when it’s time, and when we shared that house it rained like this. But I wasn’t afraid, and when we went outside and danced in it, we forgot that we knew each other only because our fathers were alcoholics and he’d been abandoned to grow up with strangers here, in my town. These are the kinds of things that draw people together, I suppose.

Now I live with someone who doesn’t dance in rain storms, and doesn’t understand my fear of them. But I swear I’ll teach my children this secret language of storms, heat, and water, and they can dance with a young girl in the rain before it’s too late.