Weather Girl

I love storms - always have. When I was a little kid, I would stand on the porch to watch the leaves on the trees whipping upside down - you knew it was going to be a humdinger if the leaves were underside-up. And the darker the sky, the better.

My great-granny would shout, "git in here, young'un, it's fixin to come a blow!" and then proceed to panic over an array of potentially disastrous outcomes. To this day, she remains one of the most impressive worriers I've ever known.

Our local weather personality would place her Velcro storm cloud on the storyboard during the 6 o'clock news, and I knew I had something to look forward to. It was rumored that Margie liked to take a nip of bug juice during the commercial break, and sometimes the yellow cardboard lightning bolt would be pointing up as if Zeus was aiming for Canada instead of Florida like usual.

Storms make me feel charged and alive; like the chaos in my gut is being dramatized across the sky, in a good way. The wind, especially in spring and summer, blows the cobwebs off my soul - an air baptism. And though I have only done it twice intentionally, getting soaked in a downpour is plain old exhilarating.

With today's technology, I can now know when it's going to storm several days in advance - giving me plenty of time to get stoked up for the show. Sometimes I feel like I got ripped off if it blows through too quickly, and it's an especially crappy occurrence to have the storm disintegrate on its travels from west to east.

What's that? Did I just hear a rumble? Was that just a flash?

Yeehaw! Here we go, boys!