I had my grandkids overnight on the weekend. I don’t do that enough, but then we’re all too busy, aren’t we, with too much going on.
I often think about how many times I coulda, shoulda, woulda visited people who are gone now, but, I didn’t. Excuses are like Kleenex, you pull one out and another one pops up waiting to be used.
It was crappy weather, so we didn’t get to do all the normal outside stuff we normally do, but we had a pretty good time and our day was easy.
Just about bedtime the thunder started. We all know that thunderstorms here usually pass over pretty quickly, but this one looked like it was settling in. We turned off all the lights and sat in the dark in the living room and watched the show outside.
We had some pretty serious discussions about thunder and lightning and my grandson seems to a bit of an expert on mythical gods. I made a joke about Thor getting that name when he dropped his big hammer on his toe and shouted “ouch, I’m Thor.” He didn’t laugh. Very seriously he advised, “Grandpa, with all this lightning outside, it’s probably not a good time to be making jokes about the gods.”
“I’m not scared,” his little sister said. But her eyes were just visible above her favourite blanket and she was clutching her stuffed animal very close.
I made a feeble Grade 9 science effort to try to explain about positive electrons and high and low barometric pressures, but no one was buying it and my lesson plan faded in the next rumble of thunder.
I told them about my Grandma and the little rhyme she taught us to recite during a thunder storm, “The thunder rolled, the lightning flashed, the world was all ashaken; the little pig turned up his tail, and ran to save his bacon.”
That led to sharing other lightning stories and I related the one about Ben Franklin and the kite and electricity. My granddaughter offered her opinion that Ben probably shouldn’t have been outside during the storm. I never really thought about the safety aspect of his scientific breakthrough before.
As the storm rolled over, I recalled Okanagan thunderstorms that drenched the tent, collapsed the tarp and flooded the campsite. I remembered sitting outside my uncle’s cabin on Turtle Lake in Saskatchewan under the stars and the moon, and watching a fierce Prairie electrical storm travel along the other side of the lake. I thought about previous years’ forest fire headlines and how this year the province’s underbrush is wetter than Cultus Lake firewood. This storm wouldn’t set many fires.
We listened to the rain and hail pelt down on the roof and the sidewalk and the little one said, “I’m not really scared but I think we should turn the lights back on now.”
The thunder moved up the valley. Everyone got tucked in and suddenly I realized it was completely quiet. The sky was still, the rain had stopped and the kids were asleep. It reminded me of a time we got caught in a Tofino thunderstorm while hiking, and only noticed the rain had quit when we realized how silent the forest had become.
Storms always pass, even the ones we create. The secret is to make the best use of the calm in between them. At least that’s what McGregor says.
