#20 - A Glorious Storm
My insurance company calls a hurricane "An act of God." My son called this one "awesome," a good word that has lost some of its meaning for me lately with its fashionable schoolyard usage. The forecasters were calling it "dangerous and powerful, the hurricane of the century," perhaps, like my son, a bit over-reactive. My chickens, as usual, were quite excited, not just by the violent weather whipping around their chicken yard, but by actual encounters with the phenomenon of flight.
Gloria, so far as I am concerned, was glorious. She rushed in on us, well announced, wearing a crown, skirts flying in a magnificent rage. All eyes watched her entrance; all swooned in her towering presence; all turned to see her go; and all was not the same after she passed us by.
Gloria was exciting certainly. Her coming promised a spectacle of uncommon proportions with danger and destruction as distinct possibilities, and yet the anticipation of her arrival seemed to be laced with a sense of expectation that wanted not to be cheated.
We had heard of Gloria’s birth with interest and paid close attention to all her youthful antics as they were reported on the news. Then, as she became a young lady of distinction, we kept close watch on her every affair; there was a special quality here in this one.
The calm and peaceful evening before her arrival was laden with the deceitful laziness of early fall. As I helped a neighbor to secure his boats and draw up the ramp to his dock, it was only because we knew the likely truth about what was coming that we were filled with any foreboding. I was enough wooed by Gloria’s trickery that the thought of swimming in that seductive night air was equal in my mind to the urgency of lashing things down. Yet we kept at our task; it was quite dark, and there were not many hours to go. Tomorrow was the day.
Gloria was coming. Not all preparations were complete; they never are. Some chairs were still on the lawn, and the flag on my son's one-hole golf course was still flying. The sky was filled with all the mounting signs of an autumn hurricane: low scudding clouds, high-flying leaves and flocks of hustling, worried birds, all hurtling before the wind that now gusted at impressive velocities. Gloria was indeed on her way.
The folks around town talked of little else. With one eye on the sky, shopkeepers raced about with stepladders taping their storefront windows and taking down signs. Strange, I thought, how the comradery generated by the storm so closely resembled the spirit of Christmas - it was almost a celebration. Maybe the insurance company is right . . . “Acts of God.”
It seemed time to head for home. My wife would be there, baking an apple pie before the power was lost. My son, probably hanging around stealing bits of pie dough, was supposed to be filling the bathtub with a reserve water supply and loading the flashlight and radio with new batteries. Heavy rain squalls began to drive in with the wind, and branches were falling everywhere as I drove into the yard.
Gloria was glorious, perhaps a little tired by the time she got here, but quite a girl just the same. She howled, and the trees swayed wildly under her fury. She ranted, and my mackerel weathervane spun and darted to get out of her way. And when she raged, the sound was that of a train in a tunnel. She must have had an off-day however, for those who fell under her immediate gaze stood to look her in the eye. In fact, most of us applauded her visit with admiration . . . and few regrets.
And then Gloria was gone and it was a night with a full moon, a moon so glorious it could only have had something to do with her passing. The sky was silvered, unusually bright and magnificent with racing clouds. I laid on my back under her warm breath and marveled as she flew away.