Lightning

The day was glorious - a magical summer day with blue skies and puffy white clouds, warm temperatures not hot and just the right amount of breeze to clear your head without blowing sand in your eyes. I so wished my workspace were outside (I gave serious consideration to taking a laptop to the portico to see if I could get wireless leakage there).

Mid afternoon, the sky to the east grew ominously dark and suddenly, from my vantage point at the reference desk, I saw the heavens open and the rain pour down so hard the air seemed white with froth. Rain bounced off the metal siding, drummed on car roofs, deluged the muddy spots where grass had been trampled away, streamed in rivulets down the new sidewalk, and pooled on the blacktop in the parking lot. I am thankful my office is not outside!

People dashed across campus, scurrying for shelter, holding notebooks or newspapers over their heads in hopes of fending off some of the drenching, but to no avail. Four or five students burst through the library front doors, laughing and breathless, water dripping from their faces, their sandals squeaking in useless protest.

Five minutes later, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, the birds were singing, the dark skies vanishing to the north. My guardian angel was hard pressed to keep me dry as I ran my late afternoon errands. The weather was so schizophrenic there was no way to predict when the cloudbursts would suddenly overtake you and when they would let up.

Well into the evening thunder rumbled, lightning flashed, and power came and went. My evening meeting to learn the new church music database was rudely interrupted by a power outage that I later learned was from a downed utility pole several miles away on Buffalo Road. I had to take a different route home. We changed our plans and worked on weeding the music collection until it was just too dark outside to illuminate the pages of printed music, forcing us to give up.

As I lay in bed trying to sleep, the sky poofed alive with unpredictably irregular flashes of lightning and the heavy air cracked with loud surges of thunder. Sometimes you could hear the pounding rain, other times a mournful train whistle brought close by the humidity. There's nothing quite like a New York storm front venting its fury on innocent bystanders, taming the sweltering heat and washing the grist from the atmosphere.