Another American Adventure: thunderstorm

Thursday, August 12, 2010

thunderstorm

There was a thunderstorm last night. I lay there and listened to the sharp, high pitched thunder. So different from Florida, where there is distant deep rumbling as the storm approaches, and then a lower cracking sound when it is overhead. It must be the humidity, and perhaps the ocean, that makes the difference in resonance.

Today is moving day. Lots of things have to happen at 9 am: I have to be out of the old apartment, I have to have a walk-through of the new apartment (and the person who has to walk me through has another appointment), and some rental furniture is to be delivered. I'm not sure how all this is going to come together, but I better get going if I'm going to get a video tour of the new place up by the end of the day.

1 comment:

Sally ClayAugust 14, 2010 at 3:59 AM
I wondered where those fancy couches came from!
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.