Stormy Night

I love thunderstorms.  We had a storm rumbling around last night and got quite a bit of rain, but there wasn't enough thunder and lightening for me.

I guess my fascination with storms started when I was a very young girl in Saskatchewan.  Back in the day indoor mechanical dryers were very rare, and women hung their laundry to dry in the stiff Saskatchewan breezes.  Most homes had a kind of a platform about 6 feet square and about 4 feet high, where the women could put their laundry baskets and hang the laundry on the line.  That way people didn't run into the clean clothes.  

I can remember sitting on my father's lap up on the laundry platform and watching the storms come across the fields towards us.  The sky would darken in the distance and the wind would pick up, then the thunder would start to rumble.  Eventually the lightening would appear on the horizon and start to put on a show.  We had a front row seat for all kinds of displays:  ball, chain, fork and sheet lightening.  In retrospect sitting on an elevated platform in a thunderstorm is not the best idea, especially when you're living on flat terrain.  But at the time, I felt loved and totally safe.  Originally I think I had been afraid of storms, but my father enjoyed them, and took me with him to share his enthusiasm.  His strategy worked.  I consider myself a connoisseur of storms, although I no longer go outside and watch them.

As an adult I was living south of Barrie, Ontario when the tornado came through in 1985.  I was a stay-home mother with twin sons under a year in age, and can vividly remember that the sky got so dark that the street lights came on.  It was so windy that metal shutters were ripped off our house, and we were nowhere near the tornado.  Less than a year later my mother and I attended a family reunion near Edmonton, Alberta when the tornado came through there.  Although we were safe I was absolutely terrified because I had very young sons who were dependent on me.  I will never forget how dark the sky was, yet the horizon was bright silver.  It was utterly quiet for about 5 minutes, and then the sirens started.

I have learned to respect storms, and it seems to me that the potential for violent storms has increased as I have gotten older.  I still love a good thunder and lightening show, but I have lost that sense of invulnerability that I had as a young girl.