Summerstorm

This is the storm I’ve been waiting for all summer.

I woke up from an afternoon nap and lay there for a few minutes. In the back bedroom where I slept, it was dark and quiet—more difficult to hear the soothing patter like you can in the older part of the house. It’s a difference in insulation from the world and in the original build, there’s not as much between you and me and the rest of the world.

The rain fell hard and all at once, sounding more like white noise than a summer storm.

As I lay there, my mind ruminated over and over again about things I said to a friend.

I lifted myself up from the bed and opened the back door to a deluge of summer rain and I think I smiled. At least, my heart did.

The storm passed by a little too quickly for my taste. It couldn’t—and didn’t—sustain all that force for any swath of time.

By the time I made it to the front porch, the downpour had lost most of its life force. A steady stream of roof run-off flowed down the middle of the driveway and down into the street. The back half of my body made contact with the seat cushion and as I rested back in the chair, my ears noted the raindrops have a widely different timbre, depending on the surface they hit—a slap on the expansive elephant ear waving from pounding force of nature at the edge of the porch, a thud from landing in the arms of a long-established puddle from the gutter drain, or a tap-tapping off the roof’s edge.

The excited chatter from the trees told me that sparrows and cardinals and robins knew the worst was over and there was feasting to be had on the ground. The storm was well on its way past Clay Street to fall on another head, another rooftop, another waiting field, another collection of grateful beasts who would benefit from the theatrical pop-up display.

And, those things I said? I never would have said them if I didn’t care.