The Aloofness of the Storm

For much of the night, I could see flashes of lightning over the valley, but the sound of thunder seldom carried this far, and few raindrops fell here. The storm remained tantalizingly distant, and even the clouds could barely be seen in the moonless night. Eventually, even the lightning over the valley ceased. The night grew cooler, and very late a few stars emerged. An hour before dawn, I saw a blue-white meteor slowly glide toward the northeast, about twenty five degrees above the horizon. It vanished behind the trees which were beginning to grow distinct as the sky paled to cobalt. I believe that the chance for a storm has passed, too, for now. Ah, well. At least it will be a bit cooler today.

August Gray

Gray has descended. When I was about ten years old, my older brother gave me an abalone shell which he had found at the beach. The inside of the shell was smooth, and swirled with shades of gleaming gray and bluish white. The sky today looks like that shell. My grandmother used to call this "earthquake weather." She would say this of any day which was warm and overcast. I have no idea how that old California superstition originated. I have lived through hundreds of these days, and not one of them has produced an earthquake. The earthquakes I have experienced -- the ones large enough to be worth noting, anyway -- have all occurred in the early morning darkness or twilight of days which then turned bright and pleasant. This seems to have been the case with most of California's historic earthquakes, as well. Even the quake which led to the destruction of San Francisco in 1906 struck at an early hour on a pleasant spring day. Maybe there are earthquake hours, rather than earthquake weather.

At any rate, I'm not expecting the ground to start shaking today. I'm not even hopeful that there will be a proper thunderstorm, having been disappointed by this sort of weather several times this year. Most likely, it will just remain muggy and stultifying, and shadowless day will slip into shadowless night, as enervating July has slipped into sultry August. So it goes.