As promised...

My Internet connection is slow. I guess that's what happens when it's a free ride off someone else's wireless. But I shall attempt to post pictures of our "new" house...

...okay, so that didn't work...I'll have to make the attempt from school tomorrow where the connection is stronger, though still free...part of my wonderful teaching benefits! HA!

So, let me write about the sky as that is the glorious view I have out my bedroom window when propped up in bed on the second floor trying to access the free wireless of some neighbor.

As this morning, it is gray though now there is wind. The cherry tree, with its green leaves and ripening cherries, is swaying in the breeze. But this is not a gentle breeze. It's a taunting breeze. The color of the clouds to the east is threatening, ominously stretching their greyness across a darkening sky. The air smells of rain and lightning, heavy with the promise of thunder and splattering rain. And just as I write the last line, the sound of pelting drops thread their way through the leaves of the rustling cherry tree, hammering the shingles of my new roof.

When I was a child, my parents would drive 4 days straight to Iowa City where my father would continue to work on his perpetually unfinished doctoral thesis. I remember little of Iowa City, but I do remember the thunderstorms, the hot lightning storms that rattled me out of my bed late at night and the way I raced in uncertainty and panic in search of reassurance.

Our family house sat in different houses each summer. There is one house that I associate with the thunderstorms, though the details are difficult to quantify into words. I remember a marble staircase or perhaps just marble railings. Regardless, there was marble and a granduer to the stairs. Sweeping. My bedroom was at the top of those stairs, just to the left of a small hall. I remember gray and white and black streaks swirling on the floor as I raced from my bedroom in barefeet, my blood pulsing from the white light shattered across the night sky.

It was hard to sleep after such an alarming awakening. I'd hide under my covers for awhile, but retreat to the humid air of summer when I felt the oxygen levels underneath the comforter dangerously drop. My eyes shut tight, I could still see the flash across the room and like Haley Mills in the Swiss Family Robinson, high atop her tree of safety, I'd count -- One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand -- marking the miles between me and a bolt of sudden death.

Years later, working on my master's thesis, I spent an evening in the computer lab while all of my classmates went out drinking. I was in Baltimore. The humidity had been oppressive for days. The lightning threatened all evening, but around 10, just when I was packing to head back to the dorm, the thunder grew in intensity and fired like cannons in rapid succession.

Just as I started to run from one building half a mile to the next, buckets of water poured from the light show above me. In just 5 minutes, I was wet everywhere. My underwear just as soaked as my shoes. It was during that run that I remembered Iowa and all the lost and foggy memories; ghosts of uncertainty whispering from the past. It was during that soaking that I knew I would write my thesis on my relationship with my father. When I got back to my room and changed into dry clothes, I sat down at my computer and typed the first letter to my father. The letters would later serve as my transitions between my father's story of mental illness and my own.

So now, when nights like this promise a storm, I no longer run for comfort. I see them more as inspiration -- of cooler temperatures, of dampening earth, of cleansing and redemption.

The rain has stopped for now, though the breeze is still angry and sporadic. The sky changes in shades of gray and as night falls the young men who sit on the porch at the end of the block thunder in the streets, their chests puffed, their baseball bats cocked to the left, their voices taunting and angry as the wind.