Five Minutes of Summer – October Online Blogging Challenge

The 31 Days Free Writing Challenge, dictates that bloggers pick one topic and write a post for five minutes or thereabouts, (I confess to being verbose!), on that topic each day in October.

Day 11 – Storm

“There’s a storm brewing” –

The word “Storm” evokes thoughts of threatening and damaging forces out of our control. We have storms in summertime only. Winter is dry and dusty. Summer thunderstorms  mean a sub-tropical venting of nature’s spleen, which has filled to bursting with rapidly rising temperatures and high humidity, in the tropical areas of the world. The Storm bird, known as the ‘Koel’, knows the Storm is coming, even before the weather man knows, and it sings its unique call, early in the morning or the days prior to a storm. But how does it know?

The ants also pick up the ominous signs and move to higher ground, and invade my kitchen as well! (I guess that is where the good stuff is)… This pisses off my temper which has already been pushed to the limits by my lack of tolerance for hot weather and humidity.[You can see why I like snow and the cold]

Here is a typical day for a storm:

First, we need a blistering day with mercury soaring above 29 degrees and a rapid rise in night time humidity that ensures a stickiness in the air that would challenge Scotchtape! By early next morning, the crickets signal it is time to get up from soaked, sweat – ridden bed -sheets; by morning tea, dare to step outside in the sun and you will burn in just 10 minutes, by lunchtime, the asphalt road surface shimmers with a mirage- like heat haze, and folk start to complain loudly and vociferously about “the heat,” whilst dripping with sweat, and then around 3pm, invariably when the children have to be picked up from school, the storm will break- heralded by huge raindrops the size of tennis ball that render raincoats next to useless  and ferocious wind gusts that turn umbrellas into some kind of frilly flying javelin ready to impale some unsuspecting citizen.

The summer Storm is vicious and nasty and hits with a thundering force accompanied by spectacular lightning and occasionally damaging hail.I like to see the lightning, especially the forked lightning, so spectacular, unless you are out on the sporting field. The rain is torrential, enough to fill a large water tank in minutes. It often rains vertically upwards at my place in a summer storm, as the rain lashing at my house’s guttering fails to cope with the deluge and is then directed upwards! The storm can un-roof houses, turn a paddling brook into a gushing torrent in minutes, marooning kids on pushbikes and cars alike. “If it is flooded, forget it”, is now the motto from the Road Safety Authority due to way too many cars attempting to cross flooded creeks in the midst of a storm. {At times, resulting in drownings!}

For children, storms are fun. As a child, we lived in a street with a natural gully or dip where the rainwater would collect during the summer downpours, and this invariably came close to Christmas school holidays. For an hour or two, during or after a storm, this street’s drainage systems would struggle to cope with the volume of water meaning the children of the street welcomed the instant, albeit, muddy-co loured, ad-hoc swimming pool and the odd car was left floating until the water subsided.

If the storm comes at nighttime, my dog panics! But this year, she won’t worry, as she is so old, she has gone deaf.  When I was 5 years old, I used to panic, like my faithful canine companion, when the storms came. My mother used to tell me it was fine, it was just Santa dragging his sack of Christmas presents across the sky, in readiness to give to the children on Dec 25th.[She didn’t explain the rain or the wind gusts, but thinking about Santa and wind is probably an area she did not want to broach, for good reason! ] The thought that this cataclysmic natural event was Santa’s doing certainly gave me plenty of comfort and was one of the most thoughtful things my mother said to me.  This challenge has brought that memory flooding back. Which also reminds me of this Gangajang song which I associate with summer in Australia and the word, “Storm” –

Out on the patio we sit,

And the humidity we breathe,

We watch the lightning crack over the cane-fields

Laugh and think, that this is Australia

Summer storm season is almost upon us, and that is something we need to prepare for, not just ponder about.

Other days in this writing challenge are found here