Strumming the earth in great, rumbling chords, thunder shook the windows Sunday night as cooler weather finally arrived. With rattling windows alarmed at every clap roaring overhead, lightning danced amidst roiling clouds weeping floods over the land. Our first touch of autumn had arrived.
I slipped outside around 10 PM after taking a quick peek at the radar. A squall line had formed west of us. It made a slow approach, a crawling thing most intent on growing, on being more, on achieving terribleness. And so it did.
Standing on the patio, vast swathes of the sky lit up like so many Fourth of July nights, each moment punctuated with spectacles of both sound and light, each stroke of electricity dashing away the night for a brief moment and showing a tumultuous sky bubbling with fury and might. Then came the thunder, sometimes immediately and sometimes after a brief pause, and it brought distant growls and nearby shrieks reminiscent of war. Nature plays no small part in the scheme of things, I thought, and she intends to make that point clear, which is precisely what happened.
Throughout the night, a dashed line of small storms joined together to form a prestigious stroke of pen, one writing words no one could ignore.
I nestled between the covers and found myself lulled to sleep with the ongoing battle raging outside. Never do I sleep so well as when I sleep with the song of storms ringing in my ears.
When morning broke, broke it did. What scattered storms had promised the previous night had become real, an assault manifest by torrential downpours and hellacious gales violently waltzing amidst the near continuous thunder and lightning that paraded across the heavens. If ever there existed an example of Lucifer’s downfall in the midst of a celestial rebellion, one where heaven and earth were rent asunder by battling archangels and gods, I witnessed it yesterday morning.
And what a fantastic event!
Not only did cooler weather ride in with the storms, but it appears to have made a significant dent in our seemingly perpetual heat. Temperatures yesterday and today struggled to reach within 20 degrees of where we have been. A majestic blanket of gloomy clouds has rested atop our heads with few signs of the sun, a phantom seen merely as apparitions of a bright being held in the deepest of shadows.
Better still, this morning’s fog was so dense and thick that it took me almost twice as long to get to work, a soup of humidity that grew worse and worse as dawn approached, a dawn that would scarcely light the sky when finally it arrived.
It would be an understatement to say it flooded, it poured, it rained buckets. It did far more than that. When it was all over, what was left behind magnified the tempest’s splendor manyfold. The heat was no more.
Ah, but it will return, albeit its back broken and its will no longer overpowering. Briefly we’ll stretch to reach anything near where the temperatures have been, but all too quickly yet another cool front will take its slice from summer’s strength.
Finally, autumn has arrived.