Weather for the Watching

I must have been a very good girl in a past life.

The Weather Gods are raining generosity and happiness down upon my 2008. Literally raining down upon me.

Plus (bonus!) thunder, lightening, hail and wind. An abundance of weather to watch! Score for me!

You know how the Chinese have the Year of the Rat, the Dog, the Snake.

Well, this must be the Year of the Barbie.

I love where I live. Western Washington. I love the gray, rainy, mild-temperature days. It's why I continue to live here, after originally moving here for a completely inferior, stupid-girl reason.

I was raised where it is perpetually brown and dusty. And HOT, three out of four seasons. The closest thing we would get by way of watchable weather was the wind blowing the dust around. If we were really lucky, the dust would blow with a rolling, tumbling tumbleweed thrown in, once in a while. It was really all we had before MTV came to town in the early eighties. The residents of this area appear to have really nice tans all spring, summer and fall but really it's just the dust sticking to their sweaty bodies.

Now I live where it is reputed, and perceived by those in other lands, to rain a great deal. And I am, indeed, all gratitude for every drop we get. (Did you hear me, Weather Gods? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.)

But I must say, I would love for it to rain even more. This I've found, in spite of where my neighbors choose to live, is not a popular notion in these parts. Which begs the question, "Why, then, do you live here?" (Another blog for another time. Titled: Weather Wimps.)

I love the fall and winter around here, along with the beginning of spring. But in most years, as spring moves into summer I only tolerate the weather with the thought that 'This too shall pass' and a self-written permission slip to complain at will.

This spring, and now beginning of summer, has been the best ever. Cool, cold, wet, gray, blustery. Happy, happy Barbie. There have been a few days of boring, uneventful warm, hot, empty blue sky days but I've been languishing in the glow of the Barbie weather so fully that I took it pretty well. Even appreciating the change, for a day or two.

The past week or so, however, it's been pretty warm and sticky. And I was starting to creep toward the edge of outright weather hostility, when last night on my way home from work around 9:00 p.m. I saw a bolt of lightening flash in the steel gray sky and I squealed! YEAH! Stormy weather! I was so happy. Then a few seconds later, another squeal after another flash. And then a third! I could have wept with delight! But settled instead, with giggling uncontrollably into my hands-free cell phone device. It was a very good Barbie moment.

There were a dozen more flashes before I pulled into my drive way. In the car I had been unable to hear the thunder, but after kicking off my shoes, I laid down on the porch swing of my deck and watched the weather. It was glorious! I watched until the flashes and rumbling were far away. Then I went into the house for a slice of chocolate-mousse-torte-something before I lay me down to sleep.

My daughter arrived home about then from an adventure in driving, in honor of her three month anniversary with her beau and asked me if I saw the lightening. She said she and J were going to go out to the deck and watch the weather. (The DNA apparently does not stray far from the Doppler Radar in my meteorological tree.)

I supported her plan but thought it was too bad she had missed the best of it. Then a renewed flash. Close and bright. Another storm came rolling over my house. I opened all the window of the house in the now dark night and turned off every noise-producing appliance device thing we owned to better hear and feel the thunder. She and her guy cuddled on the porch swing, even as the rain began. I ate my chocolate in the dark, better to see the flashes. The curtains blew freely with the damp warm summer breeze. It was the most perfect weather I could imagine.

After a bit, the weather passed and I heard the eighteen year old boy's car pull away. My daughter came in to say goodnight after she told me all about getting lost on the downtown streets of Tacoma, earlier in the evening. I read for a little bit, preparing to sleep, when it began again. Another storm. I was, by now too sleepy to stay up for the whole thing but thought rhetorically, "What better way to fall asleep." And so I drifted off. But the storm did not.

There must have been some type of wrinkle in the weather-time-space continuum directly over my house. Some kind of environmental loop.

All through the night, I would stir awake to rumbles of thunder, flashes of light.

All night.

I've never been given a storm that lingered over me all night long. It was sweet, sensual and surreal.

I think of myself as pretty articulate, but I can't accurately or adequately convey the wonder of the weather love I was granted as I slept, off and on all night. Each time I awoke, the weather spoke to me. And in between, I had the sweetest dreams. My sleep was disturbed in the most delicious manner possible, all courtesy of the Gods of Weather over Western Washington last night.