Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The Good and the Bad

We finally had a glorious rainy day. It rained just after dawn. I loved the sound on the skylights as the rain fell. In midafternoon it clouded up again and started to gently rain. Jon went out onto the deck and sat at the table under the big umbrella. I joined him. It was a soft rain...not windy so the rain would come down at an angle. If you leaned in over the table you stayed dry. Then we heard a loud clap of thunder. I said it sounded closeby, maybe a mile or so away and I decided to go in the house. We were sitting under an umbrella with a steel pole and the table is metal and the deck is wet. Chances are we wouldn't get hit by lightning because our house has already been hit by lightning on July 3, 1993, the day our son Dan got married. The small reception was at our house and we had a big tent in the backyard. The lightning knocked out the electricity to the house for a while. We restored it when we remembered about the ground fault interrupter. I digress.
It poured rain after a few minutes and we wouldn't have stayed dry on the deck for long. It is much needed rain. We are in a drought and inches behind on precipitation.
We are fine but there was a sad outcome we heard when we watched the local news. A 14 yr. old girl in our town was struck and killed by that bolt of lightning we heard at 3:00pm. She lived about a mile away and was outdoors when it hit a tree in her yard. You have to respect lightning.

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