Rambling About a Storm

In our wonderful world of digital photography, there are just some things that I can’t catch on … darn, can’t say film now can I … bit maps?  Ah…anyway, maybe if I had one of those fantastic super-duper cameras, with a special lens and a great talent for photo retouching, I was saying maybe I could have shown you this fantastically oneiric storm we had last night!

They tell me that the storm began at 1:30 in the morning, but for me it began at 2:30, when the grumbling sound of thunder woke me up…and I mean grumbling!  It was like someones empty stomach … brumm, brumm, brumming constantly with-out a break.  I heard the rain and saw the strobe-like flashes, an idea that seemed to have been borrowed by nature to show people just what strobes really should be about.

At that moment, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach: had we closed the roof terrace door?  We usually don’t in the summer, but then it usually doesn’t bother to rain either in the middle of July.  So I ran upstairs.  Raining it was, in a big way, fortunately the door had been closed, and I was really happy about that, because it looked like someone was throwing pails of water against those windows!

I went out onto the loggia, there was nothing to see from the terrace windows.  What greeted me was one of the most beautiful storms I’ve seen in a very long time.  The rain came down in sheets and the wind, which I didn’t actually hear because of the constant thunder, had the bamboo patch in my neighbor’s garden almost laying flat at moments, only to pop back up suddenly.  The birch tree swayed back and forth perilously…if it had been a sturdier tree, I’m pretty sure it would have been uprooted.  Spray seemed to fly off my roof-top from the force of the rain and the wind.

I grabbed my camera which was close at hand…yeah, I know, crazy.  And put it on a night setting and took three pictures.  One without the flash and the other’s with the flash. Stragely enough the storm lulled at that point.

Then, I saw that my neighbor was standing at her door looking at the storm too.  I can only imagine she thought I was a lit-tle strange.  About this time my husband came upstairs too.  I turned off my camera hoping he hadn’t seen me trying to take photos of a storm in the dark. However, he really wasn’t interested…he was running for a bucket…water was dripping into the bedroom.

We sopped up the water, which wasn’t very much actually, put a bucket under the drop and went back to bed.

Maybe if I had a better camera…who knows.  That blob of white center-right is my neighbor’s light.

Have a nice day!