Start over

There is a thunderstorm blowing through right now. Which probably means I shouldn't be on the computer.

This is a real thunderstorm -- "real" means true bright bluish bolts of touch-down lightning followed by the sound of the sky shattering. It reminds me of when I was a girl living in Colorado, where the prevalent thunderstorms always felt like opportunities to start over. The driving rain would wash new gulleys in the driveway, or wash out the dirt roads altogether; the lightning might splinter a tree, or cause one to completely explode. If possible, I would park myself outside somewhere to watch; if my aunt was in town, she would join me.

Always, the intoxicating fresh and clean scent of sage hung in the air after the clouds and the lightning and the rain blew by. The storms wouldn't hang around in Colorado like they do in Ohio. The billowing purple monsters forged through the sky and the sun would come out again, and inevitably, UNFAILINGLY, the rainbow.

Full color, sometimes double, arching over the mountains, or over the house... run run run through the neighborhood to get the best view, over pitted dirt driveways and through scrub oak and sage.... we're clean again, shining with new(er) promise and hope -- see? There's the rainbow. Now we can start over.