Summer Storm

            The clouds are on one side a soft, sweet dark gray and a low blue. On the other, a dull rose that fades to yellow-pearly dimness, like a sheet of faded newspaper. Our yard is all dead, and prickly, spiky, unkempt, except for the harshly pruned lilac and the sturdy Rose of Sharon. There are seven seconds between the lightning flashes and the rolling, rumbling thunder that ricochets so willingly off of the mountains. The rain started soft, gentle, cold. Now it’s coming down faster, colder, but just as easily.

            The man inside my family’s house, sitting at my family’s table – he looks lost and a little sad. I surprised him with my urgent errand-running as I scrambled to find this notebook and this pen, the blue one with ink that isn’t miserly. He looks lost, and I hope to him I look like spring, like fresh air and summer rain and the clean feel of just-washed linen. I can’t see into my family’s house, I just get a snapshot of the yellow-lit window, the fringy orange curtains hanging 1/5 of the way down. A wilting houseplant. An embroidered square hanging pink against the cupboard-side.

            The mountains look hazy behind me, lost to a pale ocher mist. I’m sitting on the very edge of the trampoline, the water pouring to a pool in the small dimple that I create. There’s this large rainbow umbrella above my head, only because I don’t want this paper to get too wet. If I hadn’t struck this writing mood, I know where I would be.

Spread-eagled or curled fetal on the trampoline, frozen to the bone and feeling in tune, feeling like I belong with this tiny, tame, and quite suburban square of nature, and not just that, but the whole of it. The wind and the miniature pellets of moisture, the brief, purposeful flashes of lightning, the jagged teeth-of-giants mountains, the barely bending trees and the tall grass along the edge of the backyard fence, reminding me of safaris I have never been on.

My right foot has been pricked by some dead, disgruntled grass blade. I don’t care. I don’t care. The air smells like ozone and damp dirt, and I feel like heaven. I feel like someone small and enthralled who has not learned to love walls and sterile air and hasn’t learned to fear the world, the filthy, throbbing, gritty, wonderful, natural, living world.

My breath is short, shallow, happy, and rather shabby. Eventually I’ll go inside. I wouldn’t want to catch some six-syllabled, racking cold. It would be worth it. But my father is calling my inside to pray. I’ll have to go, and I am sorrier for it.