Drizzly thoughts

The morning makes your day: a good morning, a good day, or so the theory goes. Starbucks is built on it, or at least the café at the university where the lines are so long you have to weigh your caffine habit against the probably dirty looks you receive for walking in late. Waking to the sound of rain on the roof and the windowpanes can be soothing, a peaceful feeling of Mother Nature drinking her fill, smoky clouds pushing into the mording which, yeilding unwilling, gives unto day. The air is cleaner, fresher and bears the sharp scent of ozone. If you're lucky, the light reflecting between grey sidewalks and laden clouds charges the air with a strange intensity.

The sodden muck resulting from a steady drizzle dampens the spirits as well, as if the cold water has been pouring into my enthusiasm instead of just my collar. Nothing, however, is more exciting than a torrential rain or a lightning storm--provided, of course, of the appropriate shelter. Listening to rain and wind buffet the house and howl at the corners like an injured animal.

People of this area have a strange relationship to lightning: fear. For us, weather plays a crucial and tempermental role in our lives, changing suddenly and maliciously, cloudless skies of an unfathomable blue giving way to furious storms rolling in from the west. It can snow in June and September, be sunny one minute and hailing another. Driving into the mountains once I experienced sunshine, wind, rain, hail, lightning, snow, and back to sunshine. In the space of half an hour.

We fear the lightning as we fear few other things. Like peoples of an earlier age cowering before God we too are judged but indiscriminately, like a petulant child, and cower before that infinite power. Lightning inspires terror and frantic counting, if you are fortunate that there exists enough of a gap between the flash and the crash to not make the exercise superfluous.

But today is not such a day, and better pens than mine have exercised their creative bent on the subject of weather and storms. Today is a day that inspires no torrential writing of high creative quality; thoughts, like the weather, are insipid at best, dogged by the thought that I haven't been properly dry since breakfast.

And on a relatively unrelated note: "Still waters run deep." What the hell does that mean?