I am reading
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. My friend and neighbor recommended it to me, although he said he was not sure how I would react, as the content of the book is around the murder and rape of a young girl. The book has been very enjoyable so far. If you have not read it – I suggest you do. Chapter 16 was the first time I cried though – and it wasn’t really like the passage tragic or full of sorrow. It was about a thunderstorm.
Ever since I can remember, thunderstorms have been something that strikes fear in me. I get anxious and unsettled. Fidgety and desiring of the comfort that is only realized when you are in close proximity to another human. When I was a little girl I think I would hear the storms when they were still 100 miles away, something in my subconscious realizing that the bright flashes and claps of thunder were on there way. I would toss and turn in the bed eventually calling out, “Daddy!” It might take a moment, one or two more calls, but he would always exit my parent’s room and enter the hallway, slowly turning the round dimmer switch so that I could see him better. “It’s thundering,” I would say. I don’t remember if I would crawl into bed with Mom and Dad, or if one of them would come stay with me –but I was never alone during thunderstorms. Laying with my hands over my ears, eyes closed as tight as I could. Praying I would not see the flash. And if I did counting until the rumbling would begin. More often than not I held my breath…”one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand…”
Just as clearly I remember the nights I would stay with my Grandma Alston – I believe she might have been the one to teach me to count between the lightening and thunder. “That’s how many miles away it is,” she would tell me. We would try to figure out if the storm was getting closer or moving further away. And those memories are hard right now. I had a dream with her in it last night. It is so hard knowing I will be losing her sooner as opposed to later and I don’t know quite how to deal with it.
Digressing…
I remember the summers where every afternoon there would be a thunderstorm. My summer between 7th and 8th grade is probably the most vivid. We were building our house that year. Mom, Dad, and I were living with Grandma during that time, and each morning Dad would get his crew and go work on the house early. Soon after Mom, Grandma, and I would go that way. While we would not help much on the house there was lots of other work to do. Clearing weeds, setting flower beds, smoothing the furrows from when the land was a field. We lived on Sun Drop and Nutrageous bars as well as hot dogs from Langston’s store. That was probably the last summer that I had a sun tan anywhere close to what I have this year. The afternoon storms would always start to show and everyone would pack it up for the day. We would head back to Grandma’s house and shower – eat some sandwiches (always with stick pretzels and thousand island dressing on the side) – and play a game of canasta before retreating to the different sofas and chairs to take afternoon naps. Sometimes the storms would knock the power out for a few seconds. The large digital clock on the top of the refrigerator would flash with the power outage and come back on with the wrong time – but inevitably – the power would flicker again, and when the clock returned, the time would be correct. We never really quite figured that out.
It was while living there during my 8th grade year that I decided my science project should be around the frequency of lightening, or something. The hypothesis I was trying to prove eludes me now, but I kept a journal of all the storms that came through, how many flashes of lightning there were, and how long until the thunder. I made some graphs, and diagrams of what caused lightning to occur. Grandma helped me do a paper mache cloud and we used fuzzy red and blue balls to illustrate the particles within the cloud that generated each bolt. To accompany my tri-fold display I played a soundtrack of thunderstorms.
There was my junior year in high school – actually – August, right before my senior year started. I had gotten tickets to see Dave Matthews Band for my birthday. Mom and Dad let me take my boyfriend at the time, Jason Andrew Wylie. It was the hottest bloody day. So hot – and the sweat poured off of us. The heat built massive thunderstorms and driving home from Charlotte I laid with my head in Jason’s lap and just wanted to storms to go away.
I think storms over the ocean though are beautiful. Each summer we would always go to the beach for two weeks. Once after school got out, and again before it would go back in session. Dad would only ever come for one night – maybe two. Other than that it was just Mom, Grandma, and me. Sometimes I would have a friend come for a few days. But Dad would love it if there was a thunderstorm over the ocean we could sit and watch. The lightening streaking across the vast sky above the water was pretty amazing, and I tried to be brave and watch it with him.
When married to Justin, on the nights with storms I would sleep with my foot against his leg – knowing that he was there seemed to make it OK. I would lay awake most of the night, but eventually fall asleep from exhaustion.
As I have gotten older though, the afternoons of constant thunderstorms during the summer seem to have subsided. Perhaps it is just twisted memories of childhood that have exaggerated the severity of it all. Nevertheless last night, sitting on the patio at Crave the horizon started to flash glows of an approaching storm. “Not tonight,” I thought – I hate going home alone. That’s what I miss the most – about being divorced from Justin, no longer in a relationship with John. The companionship of simply having someone around. Of course there are other things too, and I do not mean to diminish anything about those relationships or break-ups. It’s just that the general loneliness is the relevant part here. The minutes passed and the storm got closer. Not much thunder though – but more and more lightening. No rain either. And last night there was some car confusion so I drove my friend and neighbor (from the beginning of this story) back home. We swung through the drive through at Burger King on the way to Birkdale and then sat in my car on the parking deck while he ate and we talked about all the random things that comprise our conversations with each other. Most often it is his restaurant we talk about, or the general absurdity of human kind these days. During our time on the deck I was growing ever more paranoid about the storm, even to the point I pulled my laptop from the back seat and connected to my wireless network to check the radar. About 5 miles north of us was a giant red blob just sort of sitting stationary and changing shapes. No indication as to where exactly it will go. He didn’t really understand my fear of storms, and I really can’t explain why I am afraid. The romantic in me would have loved to hear – “Well, just go put your stuff up and come over – I will make it all better.” (I sort of smirk and giggle as I write that.) My time with him so far gives me the indication he is not really a suave romantic like that – but he constantly surprises me, so I reserve my right to make any real assumptions. The storm never came down our way though, and after about 5 minutes of watching some tv I was off into a deep sleep.
So this afternoon I picked up
The Lovely Bones to read a bit. The end of Chapter 16 told the story of the main character, Susie, enjoying summer nights listening to her neighbor sing from across the street. She would stand by an open window and listen to him send out Irish ballads – soothing melodies wafting through the warm evening air. And she “would feel a breeze, and on that breeze was the music coming from the O’Dwyers’ house... [it] would begin to smell of earth and air and a mossy scent that meant only one thing: a thunderstorm.”
”I liked to change into a long cotton nightgown and go out onto the back porch, where, as the rain began falling in heavy drops against the roof, breezes came in the screens from all sides and swept my gown against me. It was warm and wonderful and the lightening would come and a few moments later, the thunder.”
And I cried as I read the end of that chapter. And I sat, and pondered my memories of thunderstorms, and the loneliness that I feel sometimes, and my Mom sitting at home with my Grandmother in her last days/weeks/months as the cancer ravages her, and I imagined being older…
Older, wiser, more refined, and at peace - with a cup of warm tea – walking onto my own back porch. It has a wicker sofa with soft cushions, and giant ferns hanging from the ceiling. The rain is starting to slowly come down and the cool breeze of the storm moving in puts tiny little goose bumps all over my arms. I wear soft cotton pants and a t-shirt. I sit for a few moments alone before I am joined by someone wonderful. And he sits next to me. We smile. All seems right with the world. The lightening flashes. I flinch. As I tuck my knees up in front of me he leans in and wraps his arms around. The thunder rumbles and we engage in our random conversation.
