The Calm Before the Storm

I wouldn't call it a calm really, more of a perilous pause. You can't take an eighty-degree day in April in the Northeast and not get something out of it when the evening cool rolls in.

You can surely feel that something coming. The air turns all dense and buttery, thick and thin at once. Like invisible water. Just starting to move. It crowds in all around you as you walk through it, feeling the strength of it and all the energy it has gathered up while the sun thumped down on it all day.

It is still...no leaves to move yet... the leftover grass lies pressed against the ground, the woodpile canvas shrouds the logs in silence. Distant sounds ring like an omen..is that train across the river coming right here up the hill?

Batten down the hatches. Unplug the computers, close the doors, feed the pony, air the doggy. It is coming.

Then a hay string on the dump truck canvas begins to twirl. Just an eddy. A thin little thread poking at it.

A bright pink flash cracks across the valley. lighting up the river.

Snap, crackle, bang, rattle, gust and howl, drip and slash, it is here just at dinner time. We eat our homemade spaghetti sauce dumped over an interesting mixture of assorted pastas that caught Becky's fancy and listen to it lumber down the valley....the first of what will surely be many of its ilk. I guess it must really be spring....finally.