This Too Shall Pass
Minute and gentle rain turns suddenly horizontal and wind blown. Heavy drops cascade across roof tops glancing into a fine mist and blown out into a tiny oblivion. Abruptly thunder roars sourcless in the distance. The house is as dark as that first day-wise hour of morning. Near-black clouds roll through low in the sky as ominous and dark as an oil fire perhaps only a few blocks away. I feel tiny droplets of water on my bare feet sitting at my window and I rise to close a few around the house as the wind continues to pick up. A long grating of thunder just east of north. The storm is coming from the west. The head of it, it seems, will miss me.
It is calming and quieting but likely only for the time being. Something in the truculent dark of this late Sunday morning suggests more is to come. The harshness of it lasted only 20 minutes and now the rain is soft again. As soft as when it had first started. A softness that feels like it could last all day if it had a reason to, but something in that deep rolling thunder, like mountains tumbling through a Lake Michigan sized sand timer, suggests otherwise.
Sirens in the distance. Why not. There ought to be sirens when a calm is reached in a storm. A moment of reprieve to recollect and reassess. A few birds do come out of hiding. Small and charming and very fast and wary of the slightest indication of danger. They know they will find safety quickly enough to chirp a few warning calls from a fence post. I do not know what kind of bird makes that sound. It is a kind of chireep chireep. Some calls are drawn out a little further than others. Some in close succession. They often come in pairs. A pair distinguished by similarities in duration of their calls to one another.
The rain is very calm now. The kind of rain to be enjoyed while camping. Lying in a tent reading or sitting under a tarpaulin by a small fire. And just as the vast calm seems minded to linger, the birds have stopped. There is a steady increase in intensity of rainfall. The tin roofing sheets of my landlord’s garage sounds with the pattering rain above all else, is what I draw upon for the clearest indication that something is changing. A new intensity is coming to bear.
And then the sound of water snapping if water could snap. A flash of lightening. Another distant siren. Then a great boom of thunder from the north. I am not even able to complete the phrase one-one-thousand from the quick flash to the roar that proceeded it. Then another roar more distant and fading with no flash of lightening. This dayless daylight stifles the clarity of the flashes when they are too far away. Though to say the source of that deafening concussion is far is severely inaccurate.
A kind of plateau has been reached I think. This raised intensity feels like it might stick for a moment or two. My neighbor is walking the dog through the alley. Shit bag in hand and no umbrella. Taking it pelting rain like a champ.
I take note of changes in the sound of the rain snapping on the tin roof to gage the intensity. It marks the changes in the most obvious way, and there has been a change. A small one at first and then more obvious, but perhaps without earnest, like the storm now could be halted at the slightest antagonism, but that is a characterization that is not in the least bit true. This rain stays, like all rain, until it is finished with precisely as much force and intensity as is necessary to resolve what has induced its effect.
There is yet much thunder in the distance ; a far distance, but thunder nonetheless. Perhaps another plateau is being reached. It is 12:02. The church a few blocks away is sounding its digitized church bell song on a loud speaker. At least that’s what I think it might be. It is faint in the rain and pleasant nonetheless.
A tiny grey bird with dark brown markings on its back has sought shelter under the front wheel well of my landlord’s daughter’s car. ….. I am mistaken. It is not a bird. It is a tiny puddle forming in a depression under the wheel. Drops of water falling from the mud flap making tiny ripples in the puddle that make it appear as if it were a bird there cleaning its feathers and looking about. I thought that seemed like a strange place for a bird to spend such a long time at.
Cool breeze through the humid rain sodden air. It has a cool green smell. August 18th. The Midwest is at its deepest depths of summer and weather will shortly begin to take on changes marking a clear direction toward fall. Perhaps this summer storm is the mark of the very first and faintest of changes to meet the distant season to come.
There is a dove nearby. I cannot see it but I hear its lazy Sunday call — Whoo-Ooo whooo who who, owl-like. The storm will pass and the ground will begin to dry in less than an hour. Nothing is what it seems initially. We are often too caught up with trying to predict the future of things we do not understand, and we are wrong so often about those predictions and how discouraging they might not have been had we just let it be, one would think we would at least have learned to live more fully before depending on such things.
Like the initial portents of a thunderstorm that passes into a beautiful summer’s day, had we just left our preconceived notions aside long enough to enjoy the exhilaration of it we would have come out the other side as a stronger, more experienced person. No thing is permanent, not storm nor beautiful summer’s day, so then the solution is to let got of solutions and to, simply, be content with what is. Then perhaps life will yield so much more contentment that it would only be reasonable to be content.
