We lost power for some hours on Sunday just when I was thinking of loading on a Sunday Birdhouse.
No loss. Actually, sort of blissful.
It's good for the soul to lose power during a summer rainstorm so one can really hunker down and hear the rain, be the rain, flow with the river. All that electricity and madness attached just tangles the body and mind too much in its schedule. It's good now and then to get knocked off schedule. I almost got knocked off the planet, but I'll get to that.
As long as the power doesn't stay off for some days with this heat and ruins all the food storage, then all is okay.
It all seemed to come about when a lightning bolt struck out of nowhere. It was barely raining. I had come back inside after cutting brush as a side-event just waiting and watching the storm form. I often grab a tool and am outside with the approaching storm, knowing I'm not going to last out there more than ten or fifteen minutes. Just enough time to finish up trimming some edges of ground. Barefoot. Slightly rolled up pant cuffs to keep the bottoms from getting wet since it's already lightly raining.
The storm map shows the severe rain clouds dividing almost where our river valley is, which is often the case. Heavy snow or heavy rain being thrown either side of the hillsides east and west of us. We may get spared a down pour yet again. Or watch it all dump into the valley and punch us out.
We got spared the rain, for the moment (it seems to circle back and find us anyway) and instead got smacked a thunderbolt right where I had been working ten minutes earlier. Now I was inside, face to the windows, trying to scroll in video from the Glastonbury concert — a Los Angeles group called Deap Vally, the leader singer with jean shorts chopped shorter. The woman drummer straddling her kit. Heavily costumed backup singers lifting their silvery arms in unison like wings of flight. It's colorful. I later read the two women in the group, Lindsey Troy and Julie Edwards, met at a crochet class.
The thunderbolt flashed a contusion of bright light against our house, flew through the open door, and Sweetheart yelped greater than the time she met up with the snake in our bedroom a few weeks ago.
Since our computer has a back up battery that lasts some minutes, the house clamped down immediately black but the concert and the lively girl group hung with us. Sweetheart felt a great deal of the lightning strike on her bare left arm — the wavelength — and goose bumps stayed shocked on her bare legs for one hour after the strike.
It's been a summer, already, of jungle-like proportions: nights of streaking rain, heavy foliage, a high mud river that settles to frothy and pleasurable swimming rapids, thousands of daylilies about to burst, and all along we were burning firewood up until June 15th.
Without power we finished cooking supper by candlelight and carried it upstairs to eat by the wide bedroom windows loving its light. I'd stay there for two hours afterwards, like the ten year old girl I am, reading a favorite book until the power was restored.
Then the birds came out and sang us through twilight.
[ BA ]
Glastonbury :
Deap Vally:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/ej58q9/videos/p01c401d#p01c412c
Portishead:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/ej58q9/acts/aqnv4f#p01c2dhs
Elvis Costello:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/ej58q9/acts/axdmxj#p01c37vy
Dinosaur, Jr.:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/ej58q9/acts/adjq2m#p01c27jn
