Storms

There's nothing like watching a storm come in over lake Erie.  You can see the clouds start to join together, while the colours darken giving an erie glow to the water.  It's very hard to not recognize the majestic power happening right before your eyes.  The clouds move quickly towards you, as the waves increase in size and intensity.  White caps are all you see, as far as your eyes can go across the lake.  The noise from the waves hitting the shore begins to sound like you are inside a tunnel filled with water and they are sloshing you around.  The sound is intense, as the storm builds.  The gulls are flying like crazy above the white caps, waiting on an easy meal, their feathers shine, almost a metalic colour, against the dark cloud backdrop.  Your heart starts to speed up, you feel your arms and legs start to kind of tingle with excitement.  All of a sudden there is crack, and a loud boom and you head to shelter because this is going to be a big one.

I love a storm, there is so much power, so much excitement in them.  It doesn't have to be a warm summer one off the lake, it can be a snow filled one also.  When the world becomes electric with the excitement only a storm can bring, makes me feel alive.

When I was in the eleventh grade we had one of the biggest snow storms I can remember.   It all started on a Saturday afternoon.  My parents were in Toronto at a boat show and I was alone at home.   It had been planned for quite some time and I was okay with it.  I was scheduled to babysit on Saturday night, and they were going to be home early on Sunday,  I had exams the next week so most of my free time needed to be used to study and prepare anyway so having the house empty would only help with that. 

The storm rolled in around noon on Saturday.  We lived in the snow belt of Ontario and were very used to bigger storms, and from what they were saying this one was going to be a big one, but nothing that would have too big of an effect on anyone, maybe just inconvenience some people Saturday night.  I was to be at my neighbours by 5:30 to sit with their kids while they went out to a wedding reception. 

Before I headed over to the neighbours I spent a hour cutting fire wood for our wood burning stove.  There was a room in the house that was only heated by wood so I wanted to make sure I had enough wood for the night, that way I would come home to a warm place to study and not have to go out in the worst of it.  When I finished I headed across the street to watch the kids.

At about 10:30 the parents came home, they paid me and told me how bad it was out there.  It seems that the reception shut down early so that those who were from the county could get home before they closed the roads, the storm was gaining up speed and turning into something no one had predicted.  I went home and watched the news, and then I stayed up for a while and watched the storm.  It was pretty intense.

I woke up to the same conditions that where there when I went to bed.  Nothing was weakening, and I wondered how on earth my parents were going to make the 2 hr trip in this.  On our back porch there was drifts as high as the windows, and I couldn't even see where the yard ended and the road began.  No plows had been down our street for hours, maybe not since sometime yesterday afternoon and that told me that they were working really had keeping the main streets clear and couldn't get to the back streets.  This was pretty normal.  I went outside and cut a lot more wood, and was beginning to feel a bit like a pioneer on the prairie's back in the 1800's, out chopping wood to keep the insides warm as the storm attacked the world around me.  I imagined I was Laura Inglis, trapped in a shack in the middle of a late winter storm, slowly freezing to death. 

My parents called around 2 that afternoon.  They had left Toronto not knowing about the storm hitting our area and had made it as far as Stratford and couldn't go any further because of all the road closures.  They were going to stay with friends until it started to lighten up and until then I was on my own.  Stratford was only 20 minutes away, so that tells you how bad this thing really was.

On day three the sun came out.  My exams were cancelled that week as even when it did stop it was going to take some time to dig the town out of this, so there was no need to plan when they didn't know when to plan for.  I loved the idea of having more time before my first exam, it was quite a relief.  On that third day I got on my snow suit and headed into town on foot.  I needed milk and also wanted to drop in on my sister-in-law and see my baby niece.  It was alot of fun meeting people on the street as they were feverishly shovelling out their driveways and cleaning off their roofs.  There was about three feet of accumulation over those three days and that amount can cause serious problems if left on some roofs. 

I love the feeling of a good intense storm, but I also like the ray of light that first appears as it turns direction and heads out of town.  Storms create such a feeling of excitement and electricity, its almost addictive.

Storms in life and storms in weather are all very similar.  When you are enduring a difficult storm in life, you are filled with electricity, most of which comes in the form of stress, but it is still there.  It's during storms that we feel alive, awaken, and ready to move beyond it to the brighter days.  I love the feeling, even when it's not a good time it's there to remind me that there is always a light at the end that shows me a new way of looking at things.  There will always be storms of all sorts, it nature, it's what makes the world go around.