A while ago, Spider Girl and I were talking about the weather.
"I love storms." I said.
"No shit. You're Fire and Water sign, mixed. That means your element is Storm." Spider Girl has a way of stating the obvious.
"Huh." I said. "Who woulda thunk it?"
I can tell when the storms are coming. I get jittery, like I drank too much caffeine, and spacey. I get irritable too, unless I vent some of the extra energy I get. It’s like having 120 volts in a 100 volt body. The air crackles with expectancy, and I wait in the pregnant space before the storm, wanting it to get the fuck over itself and show up.
When I was little I loved the storms that came over Florida every day. Rain by itself does little to move me. I love lightning, thunder, hail, sleet, and heavy rain pounding into the buildings and thunder shaking the eves.
Colorado is great, we've got Prairie Storms. A prairie storm is short, bloody, fierce, and intense. It is something you must see or experience to understand. If one’s coming at you in the open highway in Arizona, the only thing you can do is roll your windows up, park your car, and hope you don’t get washed off the road. Mother nature is being ferocious here. Three or four inches of water will fall from the sky in an hour, and then the sun will shine and life will return to normal.
I'll stay outside for as long as I can during a prairie storm, unlike sensible people who get the hell out of the way. During littler storms I'll dance around outside in the rain like a nutcase. It's fun, it's primal, it’s celebratory, and it releases the edge the storm gave me.
Constant drizzle coming from the sky is bullshit. Give me my fierce rain, my wild rain, the freezing water pulling the warmth from my bones, the wind whipping my wet hair into my eyes and lashing at my face, the mighty, invasive, all-filling thunder, and the dazzling, blinding lightning that both humbles me and fills me with awe. I’ll stand out in it and howl at the lighting, scream back at the sky, fight with it, and love every second of it, then collapse into my dry bed and sleep like the dead.
Now, that’s a storm.
