Occasionally, whether actually or symbolically, one gets to watch a storm roll in. I did both today.
The symbolic storm began this afternoon. There I was in my scout leader uniform, sweating, wondering if I’d put on deodorant, looking out the window at the cars pulling into the driveway. I looked back at the boy, and I saw the storm on the horizon. He wasn’t having a good day. He was stressed. People that have not had children around in a long time forget—they have this false idea that there are well behaved children, and there are poorly behaved children. In reality, no child is well behaved all the time. Today, was one of those days.
The storm broke open. The boy burst into tears. He proceeded to be sad throughout the entire scout meeting, which is rather inconvenient as the leader’s son. He’s an intense personality—when he’s happy, he is pure happiness; when he is sad, he is miserable. But that’s life. The storm passed.
Then, time for the actual storm. The storm makes her rounds across the peninsula nearly every day. She’s been working so hard lately, this late in summer, that she has been showing up nearly at dusk the past few weeks. She started to appear on the horizon while we took our evening walk in the park. Her edges were just a bit of fluffy cumulus cloud crowding out that sleepy golden sun. Then, she released a burst of thunder, far off in the distance. We were walking through the swaying pine trees when she did this, near the construction site. The site opened up an expanse of sky for us, showing off the lingering summer afternoon, before Mrs. Storm could eclipse it.
A half-moon hung in the sky, a cool breeze whipped around me, a general silence of insects—it all felt very much like the change of a season. September is not so very far off now. I am getting weary of the evening storm, and ready for those lingering gold sunsets. I like to watch the gold rays get lower and lower, until it is just a dimly lit dusky sky, with stars popping out everywhere. I love the cloudless seasons.
Despite the storms, it has been a #beautifulsunday.