Crickets and Ice Cream and the Dentist in the Sky

The storm dumped so much water in such a hurry, it suddenly fell asleep.  Rain-rain-rain swimming pools of rain falling nonstop from the blackness of the sky and then BAM.  NAP TIME.

All gone.

So quiet.

The crickets were like, SCORE!, and started singing and celebrating as the eerie silence surrounded my house. They didn’t even know there was a tornado warning today. They didn’t even know they almost got evicted. They didn’t even listen to the news.

They just took it as it was and moved forward. And probably ate a nice dinner with some ice cream for dessert.

I remember back in the day when the weatherman would say it was going to rain, and we’d put on shorts and walk to school because if you stood outside and smelled the air and evaluated the mountains, you knew it wasn’t going to rain. And it wouldn’t. And we were right.

And every once in a while he said it would rain and we smelled the sky and checked to see if Mom’s knees were sore and concluded that we agreed. And we were right, of course. I always said I wanted to be a weatherman because I could be wrong about everything all the time and still bank a decent paycheck.

But now we can watch the storm live as it gallops across the sky. We know that it will rain at 4:26pm and will stop at 9:01pm. We all just look it up online. But that kind of takes the fun out of it. So maybe it’s good that I’m not a weatherman because it sounds like that job could be obsolete here pretty quick. And then I’d end up homeless and looking through Walmart’s recycling for a better box I can live in down the alley behind the Tiffany store.

But I love the violence of it all. The clouds rage around all pissed off.  Roiling and boiling and making the wind visible. The twists and turns. Shaking your house and trying to pull out your windows like they were rotting teeth. The Dentist in the Sky. The trees in the yard are kelp in the sea. Keep bending, I tell them. Then you won’t break.

The storms are the raging wildness of my soul. The metallic sick joy of pain. I scream and the wind rips the words from my throat.  Over and over. The rain blends into my tears and I can’t taste the salt.

And all of a sudden the storm passes.  And so does my rage and anger and sadness and I’m left a bedraggled clump of meat with an empty soul.

And then it’s time for a nap.