Sitting alone under those deep eaves, on suddenly chill late afternoons when the sky turned slate, I watched thunderstorms crest the mountain. First I heard distant rumbles, a living legend, the ghosts of Hendrik Hudson's men bowling across the sky. Leaves on the trees by our empty driveway turned themselves in frantic unison, flickering from dark green to near silver as the air grew ready, full, explosive. High on the mountaintop, as the sky above it blackened, numberless treetops whipped in a wind that didn't yet touch me. Then the first shattering crack of lightning and thunder burst over the nearby mountain, frightening me further under the temporary safety of those eaves until the cold, fat drops multiplied into a hard rain that drove me inside to watch from behind the window as the fury from the skies careened above and tore into our pocket of finally welcome warmth.
Summer is the season of thunderstorms and ease.
This Sunday I visited a friend who has a deep porch sheltered by an angle of his house. When I heard, from inside his air conditioned living room, a distant rumble, I asked to sit outside, and so we did. This was a storm worth watching. At times it threw down torrents so fierce that we could barely discern the windows of the houses across his suburban street. Thunder roared, trees whipped wildly, and lightning ripped the sky.