night rain

You know what else I love? Rainstorms at night. Right now it's 11:20 pm (and yes, dark, we're that much past the solstice now, although I'm exaggerating, it was never light later than 9pm even on the longest day), and it's raining heavily and making just the most wonderful sound on the windows and out on the lake.

The storm rolled in very gradually, first just a grey fluff of clouds at the horizon, then darker over a number of hours, and then just as I was thinking of stopping reading I Can Has Cheezburger and going to bed, rolling thunder. The other night there were fireworks for some reason or other, over toward town, I saw them in the distance when I went outside to see what the noise was, but that just sounded like a car door being closed over and over. These thunder claps rolled the earth. Nature is always so much more impressive than humankind - I remember that from certain 4th of July displays that had lightening in high clouds in the distance. Cop that, God says. Call that a chrysanthemum?

I don't remember this kind of storm at night much, in either Sydney or Brisbane. I do remember the freaky thing in Brisbane of it getting much hotter overnight if cloud cover rolled in, because it reflected the heat from the ground. Freaky. Here I'm sure there is still so little heat in the ground, it having been buried under a jillion feet of snow for five months, that the effect doesn't happen.

But this rain, this full-on, proper thunderstorm rolling through town in the middle of the night on its way across the Midwest, like a freight train, this I love.