This summer, life is punctuated by storms. This happened yesterday.

Early in the afternoon, the sky got darker, the wind picked up, and it started to rain. I went around and closed windows. Carol and I kept working. In half an hour, the rain had stopped and the air had turned heavy and dank.

In the late afternoon, Carol went for a walk.

The sky grew dark. Suddenly it began to rain, but the wind was coming from the other side of the building so I didn’t have to close any windows then. The thunder started. A woman hurried by under an umbrella, pausing behind a tree for a moment, but then hurrying on again. The rain grew heavier, the wind grew stronger. A bicyclist rode by, completely soaked by the rain.

Carol called on her cell phone to say that she was going to sit out the storm over in the Someday Cafe.

Then the rain just poured out of the sky, and the thunder came fast: boom, boom, boom boom, boom. A bolt of lightning out the kitchen window and a huge crack of thunder came simultaneously, and I jumped. I imagined running out of the house in this pouring rain because the lightning had started a fire, but it hadn’t. The street in front of the house was completely covered in water, and the water ran an inch deep down the driveway below the kitchen window. The sirens started. A firetruck came by with red lights flashing and siren going. Another siren in the distance. An ambulance, fluorescent green and white, followed the firetruck. More thunder, more sirens. A red paramedic’s SUV, siren wailing, sped by on the street below, headed in the other direction.

The rain tapered off. A little more thunder, a car alarm went off somewhere. The wind died down. The rain stopped and I opened the windows. The sky is dark gray with brilliant white and pale blue.

A woman in a turquoise blue tank top walks by the house as if the rain had never happened.

The driveway is partly dry. The sky is growing dark again: more rain coming.