Jul. 1st, 2011 10:36 am
Lightning strikes!
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muckefuckBoy am I ever glad to have caught the storm last night. After a desultory shower, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu and I had lost faith that it would ever strike and were cuddling in bed. But I was worried I'd fall asleep without putting away the chicken and sausage pie he'd surprised me with for dinner, so I ran upstairs and was immediately struck by the eerie quality of the light.
It wasn't greenish enough to be a tornado sky, but it recalled one. I could hear through the open windows that the wind was up, so after putting away the food, I plopped down in the comfy chair, turning to view the parchment-tinted clouds between the quaking maple branches. As it grew darker and the colour drained from them, I turned the light on and started reading, switching it off again as the setting sun provided a burst of orange above the horizon.
(The book, by the way, was Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-candy man a.k.a. 1947 a.k.a. Cracking India--how many titles does one work need? I started it even before finishing with Siddhartha Debb's The point of return, which started promisingly but got annoyingly self-referential towards the end as he gave up on the technique of alternating first- and third-person narration and began pontificating about memory. Now that I'm over a third of the way through, I'm hooked. I'm also finally confident of the timeframe--before I couldn't tell if she was deliberately having her child narrator mix up the sequence of events or if the chronology of Partition I had just learned from Wolpert's book was already confused in my own mind.)
Eventually, the cat settled into a chair in the living room. Shortly before nine, I began to notice lightning in the northern sky and turned off the light to observe it. At first, there were only occasional peals of thunder, so I surmised the storm must be a ways off. But what a storm! At some point, I realised that there was no pause between flashes--one was always going off somewhere.
And then the thunder began to boom. I was impressed by how long our fraidy cat lasted; it took one of those room-shaking peals that sets off all the car alarms to finally drive him down into the clothes closet, where he remained for the next hour. It was another ten minutes after that before the downpour came; before that, just spatterings of rain that were invisible in the dark. I heard hail but never saw it. We can't have had anything close to the marble-size stones reported elsewhere in the city.
monshu slept through the whole thing. He woke up shortly after I came downstairs and rescued the Beast from his hidey-hole. At least he got to enjoy a cigarette in the splendid coolness that descended along with the storm.
monshu and I had lost faith that it would ever strike and were cuddling in bed. But I was worried I'd fall asleep without putting away the chicken and sausage pie he'd surprised me with for dinner, so I ran upstairs and was immediately struck by the eerie quality of the light.It wasn't greenish enough to be a tornado sky, but it recalled one. I could hear through the open windows that the wind was up, so after putting away the food, I plopped down in the comfy chair, turning to view the parchment-tinted clouds between the quaking maple branches. As it grew darker and the colour drained from them, I turned the light on and started reading, switching it off again as the setting sun provided a burst of orange above the horizon.
(The book, by the way, was Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-candy man a.k.a. 1947 a.k.a. Cracking India--how many titles does one work need? I started it even before finishing with Siddhartha Debb's The point of return, which started promisingly but got annoyingly self-referential towards the end as he gave up on the technique of alternating first- and third-person narration and began pontificating about memory. Now that I'm over a third of the way through, I'm hooked. I'm also finally confident of the timeframe--before I couldn't tell if she was deliberately having her child narrator mix up the sequence of events or if the chronology of Partition I had just learned from Wolpert's book was already confused in my own mind.)
Eventually, the cat settled into a chair in the living room. Shortly before nine, I began to notice lightning in the northern sky and turned off the light to observe it. At first, there were only occasional peals of thunder, so I surmised the storm must be a ways off. But what a storm! At some point, I realised that there was no pause between flashes--one was always going off somewhere.
And then the thunder began to boom. I was impressed by how long our fraidy cat lasted; it took one of those room-shaking peals that sets off all the car alarms to finally drive him down into the clothes closet, where he remained for the next hour. It was another ten minutes after that before the downpour came; before that, just spatterings of rain that were invisible in the dark. I heard hail but never saw it. We can't have had anything close to the marble-size stones reported elsewhere in the city.
monshu slept through the whole thing. He woke up shortly after I came downstairs and rescued the Beast from his hidey-hole. At least he got to enjoy a cigarette in the splendid coolness that descended along with the storm.Tags: