[image from google]
There is thunder rumbling down the mountains, thunder in the valley this July afternoon: a summer thunderstorm, which takes me back to my childhood. My Grandma loved a good thunderstorm. She and I would sit in the back porch of her tiny cottage on Christleton Avenue, in Kelowna, she in the Big Brown Chair, me across the room, coveting it. (There has never been another chair as comfortable in my entire life).
The window would be open, the better to hear and smell the storm, and we exchanged smiles of wonder as the thunder rumbled and reverberated, and the lightning cracked, sounding like the heavens would open any minute.
I remember the metallic smell in the air, just before the first rain fell. I once swam in the lake during one of those storms, likely not a good idea, but no one thought anything of it at the time.
We lived in a valley full of apple orchards, along a ninety mile long lake, surrounded by what I called the Big Blue Hills. I live in a valley now, ringed by mountains, at the other end of my life. Now I'm a Grandma and, as the thunder rumbles and the first fresh-smelling drops of rain begin to fall, I am taken back and back to my childhood, a full circle moment, with many years and miles between summer storms. But there is still the delight of the storm, and the memory of those long-ago storms, shared with such conspiratorial delight by me and my Grandma.
