Storm Front

My son loves the rain. He is not, however, a big fan of thunder and lightning. This could be because he grew up in Northern California, where thunderstorms are a unique occurrence. It might also be connected to his aversion to the way the house rattles in Northern California when we have "earthquake weather." Or possibly it's the last vestige of his little-boy fear of "fireworkers" exploding in the skies overhead. Unfortunately for him, his mother and father are fond of turning off the lights and savoring each flash and crash.
He learned to minimize his fears the way any son of mine would: by talking about them. He was told at a very early age that he could approximate the distance all that electricity was from us by counting the seconds between the light and the sound. The other night, as the Bay Area fell beneath the greatest display of natural pyrotechnics in generations, I could hear him counting under his breath: "One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi, Four Mississippi." Boom. "That one was pretty close." His running commentary kept us all connected to what was happening in the midst of the downpour. The streets could be running full of water, the downspouts could be choked and the storm drains covered by feet of water, and that would be fine with my son. Flooding is infinitely preferable to him to a lightning strike.
And that makes sense. Wet is better than fried. There were more than seven hundred and fifty lightning strikes over the course of the night, and it brought back memories of my youth in Colorado, where afternoon thunderstorms were as regular as the fog rolling in across the bay. And I remembered my mother's confession that she was always terrified of electrical storms, in part because of the way she was forced as a child to sit in a dark and watch the room light up with each new strike. That's why we always baked cookies with her when the storms raged as they dropped over the Rocky Mountains. It was a distraction. It was therapy. I'm guessing that my son will be taking up baking soon.