Stump Lane

LAST NIGHT, HOLY FUCK you should have heard the thunderstorm we had. It was 2 am or so and thunder woke me up, but it not your standard thunder. Long thunder. Continuous thunder that lasted several minutes at a time. It was as if maybe lightning was streaking horizontally across the sky for miles. It was unnerving. Something new and strange and unsettling and dread-inducing was happening. (I’m getting too old for this shit.)

We did see some flashes that would light up the sky for a second or two, and there seemed to be corresponding crackles of thunder louder than the low-flying-airplane-drone of the continuous thunder. For a few minutes I entertained the idea that what we were hearing was a full attack of Russian ICBM’s streaking across the sky: an old fear (and wish) left over from my youth.

This went on for probably 30 minutes with only a couple of moments when the continuous rumble seemed to fade out before starting again. So incredibly weird. At one point Ms. Montag looked out the window just as a flash of lightning lit up the sky. She said it looked as though the lightning was streaking directly at the house. The 1850 farmhouse with fourteen fucking lightning rods on the roof.

I fretted about that for a few minutes when it seemed like the storm was getting closer. Modern houses don’t have lightning rods because the past has taught us it isn’t a good idea to attract white hot lightning toward inhabited wooden structures. Sure the rods add character, but it may be time to take them down and recycle the copper. Help me sleep better on stormy nights like these.