Tonight I had to go pick up my elder son from a Boy Scout meeting, which is usual on a Tuesday night. What's unusual is the spectacular lightning show I got to drive through. Oh I'm used to a few flashes here and there, thunder, rain, the works. But tonight, it's ramped up several levels from "the usual".
While driving, my younger son and I saw several bright, clear bolts, large ones, streak from the sky to the ground, and it seemed they were not far from us. The entire sky lit up around us, not just in the vicinity of the lightning. The bolts, or lines as I've always called them, were lavender and pale blue and white, stark and dazzling against the night sky.
There's been little if any thunder, and only a little rain, no downpours. Just the sky all around us putting on a light show better than any rock concert for it's unbridled wildness. Several bolts fell all around us as I ran into the hall to retrieve my son. I imagine they were at least three miles off, but it looked much much closer. As we were driving home the lightning decided to skate sideways through the sky in branches and forks, making both boys ooh and aah in delight. I was asked several times if the car was safe. I responded with a short lesson in the conductivity of various materials (punctuated by woo!s and wow!s), and soon everyone was calm again. Journey's "Wheel in the Sky" came on the radio, and that was just perfect so we blasted it all the way home and yelled with the flashes of lightning.
I love storms with thunder and lightning, especially in the summer. When I was eight (my younger son's age), my parents would sit with my sister and I on the porch of our house and watch the sky and the lightning, oohing and aahing if we saw a line. Once the lightning faded or stopped we were allowed to run out in the warm rain on the sidewalk, in our bathing suits, enjoying the earthy smell and the water.
My grandmother lived in a second floor apartment that had a huge bay window overlooking a large undeveloped hill, so the sky was wide open above it. My sister and I with our three cousins would often sit in the window watching for lightning when storms rolled through, loving our unobstructed view. My grandmother would fret at us to not sit in the window, fearing we'd get hit by the lightning, but of course it never happened.
When I was a teenager growing up part of the time in a coastal town, fierce storms would roll down the nearby river in the summer, heading out to sea. Those were always great for rain, lightning and thunder, but with the houses packed so close together, you'd have to go out by the river to see the full show, an action that was dubious at best. Lightning struck the steeple of the old church across the street from us one afternoon when I was watching my two year old brother. A crack of thunder like I had never heard before shook the windows, and everything lit up at the same time. I did run outside then, after repeating to my little brother to stay inside, just to see if our house was on fire. But the fire trucks showed up at the church quickly, and though there was smoke, the small fire didn't get far. My little brother was a bit freaked; he actually stayed inside, at the door waiting for me, till I got back.
Years later, as part of the SCA, I'd be camping out in a tent in western Pennsylvania in medieval clothes, enduring downpours, thunder and lightning that were leftovers of a hurricane moving up the eastern coast. Seems like that would be quite far inland to get hit with hurricane remnants; it was a powerful one. Rather than be afraid of getting hit by lightning, people were sitting under the communal area pavilion, raising their mugs at cracks of thunder and screaming "Odin!", and if there was lightning, adding "Thor!" It seemed hysterically funny at the time, probably because we were drinking.
Situated in a safe spot, dry, and with friends, I could watch a summer lightning storm all night. Every one is different, and every one is beautiful. Even in one of my most tension-filled moments, in the midst of driving through Iowa at night, in pitch darkness in a downpour, one part of my mind was registering the lines striking the earth unobstructed and with abandon, wishing for one moment I could take my eyes off the road and enjoy the unrestrained dancing of the light.
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