Waiting for the Rainbow

So, do houses not need lightning rods anymore?

I have been wondering this for a few weeks, ever since thunderstorm season (I don’t use the word “hurricane,” because I think it’s bad luck) began in earnest. I distinctly remember that in Ray Bradbury’s creepy masterpiece, Something Wicked This Way Comes, it was of utmost importance to get a lightning rod installed on one’s house before the big storm arrived. And then when the lightning hit the rod, I think that was when the army of spiders started to invade the house. Or was that just some bad dream I had after reading it? Was Ray Bradbury living in Florida when he wrote the book?

I usually adore thunderstorms, but I just had to run for earplugs, since I’m typing this out in Tony’s garage office, and this is the loudest thunder I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s coming right on the heels of the lightning too (did you know that Florida is the lightning strike capital of the world, by the way?). My kids are doing fine, but I just might have to start singing to myself about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.

Or maybe I’ll just reminisce about some fun stormy times during our previous life in the tropics.

I had a lovely thunderstorm experience in the Philippines, the weekend that we stayed at a resort and went scuba diving. The whole wall of our hut-on-stilts opened up, and we stayed up late getting massages and watching a spectacular storm dancing over the bay.

It was also a novelty seeing the streets in Manila fill up and flood during the rainy season. This happened on my mission in Chile too. The street kids thought it was great fun, but it made navigating the already treacherous sidewalks the equivalent of a mud bath, especially once you added in the crazy-driving  jeepneys that would speed down the narrow roads regardless of the foot-and-a-half-deep filthy water. Yech.

My favorite thunderstorm, though, might have been in Hong Kong. We had been fruitlessly searching the city for the LDS temple, and were overtaken by a positively melodramatic tropical storm just as we finally spotted it. I had heard the phrase “sheets of rain,” and even used it myself before, but this was the first time I had ever realized that it could be literal. During a brief break from the clouds, we snapped this photo, and then rushed our baby (and our camera) to the safety of a dry doorway. Fun times!

Well, it worked. the rain has stopped, and the thunder seems to be moving away too. Thanks for waiting out the storm with me!