It's 8:20. Everyone in the house should be up, but no one really is. I let our feral cat, Lilly Hinckley, in and I can feel the heavy, saturated August air. The sky rumbles ten miles away. It feels, and sounds, like a distant Shakespearean premonition. A dark and dangerous day dawns.
"You working today," I ask Jay.
"What time is it?" he whispers into his pillow as thunder crashes into our house. Rafters and joists rattle. Big drops of rain start to pour
in a cinematic blur.
"About 8:20. You going to take the van? Looks snotty outside," I explain to my sailing instructor son. I use my most embarrassing nautical lingo. Jay expects nothing less from me.
"I'll take the Whaler... likelihood of getting zapped is practically nil." Savoring his hubris, I'm wondering whether on-water safety is part of the curriculum that Jay teaches at Masons Island.
Jay leaves, seemingly washed from our front step, down Front Street fifty yards, and dropped into his eleven-foot Boston Whaler. In the meantime, incredulous at Jay's actuarial threat assessment prowess, I retreat to my computer. A massive lightening strike triggers a utility circuit and the lights go out, along with my computer. As the power returns seconds later, I hear a moaning siren.
As the siren grows louder, it feels like it is coming from inside the house. It's a troubling sound, and I want to find a logical explanation. The dryer vent? A utility alarm in one of the boxes on the poles outside? I step out, draping one of Elizabeth's coats over my head. The rain feels good on my feet,but the siren spooks me. It is everywhere, like light, and I think of Cormac McCarthy's book, "The Road." Yes, it's a pre-apocalyptic feeling.
As much as I am thrilled at the rain, what it does for my crops at the farm, there's a deep lump in my throat, and a feeling of being totally powerless to locate the siren. The prospect of a sudden hot flash of light, and nuclear oblivion, is all too real. Especially with this phantom soundtrack blaring and scaring.
In the end, as the morning plays out, I learn that Jay decided against the stormy river crossing.
"Really? What changed your mind?"
"I guess I got scared when a boat on a mooring, about a hundred feet away got struck by lightning." Jay says he closed his eyes because he wasn't sure if he was being electrocuted. "Driving through the storm was fun, until I got a flat tire."
Deb's sister, Sue, calls, just as the storm is ending. She wants to know if there had been any tornado activity in our area. Apparently our civil servants had activated the early warning alarms, and the reverse 911 call came in after the storm had blown over. In hind sight, it all makes sense, but the terror of the alarms will live with me, can never leave.
It's hard to tell how much rain we got at the farm. Hours later, I can feel the wetness of the ripe cherry tomatoes. I harvested a bunch of tomatoes today, and delivered the lot to Frankie at The Universal in Noank. The field is so oppressively wet and hot that it is tough to work. The bees are all about, and I guess the corn has reached a pubescent stage. From each gangly stalk, ears are developing, each with an awkward shock of golden silk.
Everything in the garden is growing at breakneck speed. Our cantaloupes are big and round, solid and sound. Although I cannot tell how many pumpkins are in the large field, I know we have a few very large green ones.
It has been a strange day. Yet, in a way, it is equally pleasurable to follow the development of a garden, from seed to harvest. I hope we never experience the sirens that lead to blinding white nuclear light. If we do, I think I'd like to be somewhere in the garden, far from warning.
I'd rather be tending to a life incapable of such mischief.
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