Storms

It's been awhile, yet again, since I've posted. Today I'm just going to write about some randomness and that randomness is about storms.

I'm not going to be all sorts of metaphorical and talk about "storms in life." I'm talking about real storms - storms with streaking lightning and booming thunder and pelting rain. Storms that can be so full of electricity that the hair on your arms will stand up. Storms that are so windy your gas permeable lenses are almost pulled from your eyes.

Ever since I can remember, I have always loved storms. While most people dread seeing storms in the forecast, I get excited. I have skipped more than one meal because WoodTV8 has interrupted our regularly scheduled programming to bring us a weather alert and I become glued to the TV like it's the Super Bowl.

I remember being as young as three or four years old and my older brother Tony and I would be sitting on our enclosed front porch with the main door open and peering through the screen door, past the bus garage and football field, and into a darkened sky filled with lightning. My mom told us that the thunder was just Smurfs bowling. I told Timmy that once and he blinked his eyes at me like I had lost my ever-loving mind.

As Tony and I got older, we would take the stools from the counter and sit in the studio (basically just a back room in our house, but we dubbed it the studio because when my Dad and Mom were still married, that is where my dad had his music studio) and stare out the big window with the broken window sill (broken because my dad had taken a broom and tried to kill a wily and elusive bat that had made it inside our home and instead of hitting the bat, hit the sill instead) and gaze across "the back 40" (our nickname for the backyard) and watch storms roll in from the west. By the way, I am aware that that sentence is quite long and confusing, possibly a run on sentence. I'm okay with that.

Not everyone is like me, though. My little (but bigger than me) brother was a little more on the anxious side when storms rolled through. The only reason this entire blog post came to mind was because I watch my kids together and they fight so horribly now. They can be so mean to each other and everyone says it's normal and it's sibling rivalry. For me, it just wasn't ever that way. I rarely ever fought with my brothers. They were my best friends. My sister and I never really fought, but she is also much older than I am and was out of the house by the time I was nine. I was super close to my brothers (I'm closest to my sister now that we are adults though!) and we truly never fought. I don't know if it's just because we were spaced out enough in age to not always be in each others' business or if it is because I only saw them a few times a month because of our various custody schedules. Either way, any time my little brother and I would even start to fight, we would be immediately say 'fake fight!' and then we'd hug and go back to being best friends.

Like I said, my little brother wasn't a big fan of storms when we were young. There is one very specific memory I have from when we were about 8 and 11ish and we had a pretty strong storm rolling through during the evening. I think only me and my brothers were home at the time and there was a lot of thunder and lightning going on. We were watching TV and I was sitting in one of the recliners. At one point there was a clap of thunder that shook the house and my little brother squished himself into the recliner next to me. I put my arm around him to keep him safe and we sat like that until the storm passed.

There truly wasn't much more time after that when my little brother surpassed me in height and our roles reversed - he became the one that protected me from boys and jerks and bullies. Even now he stands nearly a foot taller than me and even though we don't see each other that much anymore, he still takes care of me.

As for my big brother, we are still pretty much the same person. We share almost all of the same loves whether it is our love of storms or our interests in conspiracy theories or our taste for music and movies.

I don't really know why I felt compelled to write this, but I'm glad I did. I should do this more often.