The Calm Before
You could feel a change in the weather that morning. Already a heavy mugginess packed the air as I loaded up the boys for the drive to school. The sun was deceiving. But I knew better.
It was about noon. I had just finished an hour up at the school office answering a round of phone calls during staff meeting. Gloria made pesto tortellini when I returned to Yali, busy with a giant tub of Legos on the kitchen floor.
Meanwhile, the sibling group text message was blowing up with diagrams, maps, and radar of the approaching storm moving in fast through Jeff City. With all five of my siblings trained weather spotters, it’s little surprise. Even my cousin gets in on the action sometimes. Carrie texted me saying that Lucia wanted to know if my “knee was acting up again” from the incoming weather. It still does that sometimes from my near brush with hypothermia, horseback riding about seven years ago. My knee was A-OK, but sometimes it gives off false negatives. Today was one of those days.
I stepped out onto the deck for a moment after Yali went down for his nap. The same heavy air, peach-colored sky pushing through full-blown neighborhood greenery. It was coming.
An hour later, a rumble of thunder growled in the west. That electric green of the grass and trees right before a storm was my indication. Yali and I packed up early to leave for school.
Just as we rounded the bend on 141 to open sky – green. Green for hail. The whole sky was green, rolled up at the top with dark scud. Like Moses parting the waters, it seemed almost subterranean, that wall of green sky. We waited at the light; dark green woods split with white dogwoods. And as we went on, the sky was suddenly filled with billows of seeds and pollen shot through the air by the wind.
We pulled into the parking lot seconds before it broke. I grabbed Yali out of his carseat, watching the wave of green rain surge towards us across the groves just past the school.
Safe inside, we watched and listened. Rain, hail, wind, and thunder. All that good stuff. About time we had a decent afternoon thunderstorm. Nothing else quite like it.
On the drive home, the “under the weather”-ness I’d felt in the back of my throat and eyes all day, took off. I had an Advil and let the boys eat chimichangas for dinner while I tried to rest. Because moms don’t have time to get sick.