A summer night in the mid-seventies. ABC showed the awful TV movie The Tribe, a low-rent One Million BC knock-off, which I watched in the hopes it would at least feature dinosaurs, but no, only Familiar Faces, swaddled in fake beards and fur, carrying clubs and chucking spears throughout the usual SoCal settings. It only ran an hour and a half, followed by another, even less inspiring second feature, part of the network's Double Feature Fridays. I grew bored and wandered outside.
Walking the familiar environs of the farm, I didn't stop to look up, but I did notice how quiet and still everything seemed, how the usual constant late-summer whirring of the cicadas seemed unusually intermittent, how the fading light seemed oddly tinted.
I wound up at the pasture. The buildings of our farm stood at the top of a hill, the fields below. The pasture, mostly, was a hill leading to the fields, a well-worn path marking the way. This night I lingered at the top of the hill, walking slowly into the tall grass.
The blades trembled, as if in fear, and I finally looked up. Clouds, ever darkening, skittered through the sky, west to north. The wind wheezed asthmatically through the old corn crib and barn somewhere behind me. I laid down in the grass, felt it move, watched the heavens. Finally the clouds seemed to cease moving, became one large, bluish-gray mass, seeming to swallow the very horizon.
A drop hit my face, and another. I leapt up and scurried back to the house, and as I reached the sidewalk, the full fury engulfed me, water battering me so hard I could barely breathe. I stumbled into the back porch and stood in the doorway. For such a brutal squall, there was no thunder or lightning, and our dog Penny, who was terrified of storms, did not cower in fear, and sat beside me, and together we lingered for some time, watching the rain.
