I got an email today from John, our intrepid owner, about the blistering heat and thunderstorms in the U.K. recently. So I wandered on over to Weather.com and checked out the weather in London. It’s in the 70s. Blistering? John, you are a true lightweight where this whole weather thing is concerned.

I live on the edge of Tornado Alley. It’s hot. Really hot. I can say blistering and mean it.  It was over 100 degrees today!  And thunderstorms?  Now if they are having thunderstorms when it is 70 degrees out, they must be little teeny tiny thunderstorms.  We have real, honest-to-goodness thunderstorms! The kind that crack so loud above your head, the house bounces.

And that of course, reminds me of a story, which I will tell at the expense of my poor dear mother.  My mother is terrified of thunder and lightning. Genuinely scared to death of the stuff.  She hears one clap of thunder and she freaks out.  (Sorry Mom, but you do - you started to freak out over the one you heard on the phone when you were talking to me that time.)  She lives in Seattle, so she too is a lightweight about this weather thing, just like John.  At least they are in good company.

My mother has had two major run ins with thunder and lightning.  Probably more, but only two that I have been privy to.  The first one was when I was a kid, maybe about 13 or so?  She had a friend who was a very Charismatic Christian - he believed you could handle anything through prayer.  I believe that too, but I think he approached it differently than I do.  But that isn’t the point.  He suggested, while watching my mother panic over the thought of a forecasted storm, that she take the bull by the horns, and attack the fear where it lived.  In other words, in his eyes, the Devil was the problem, so therefore she didn’t need to deal with the weather, she needed to deal with the Devil.  The advice was noted and thought about for some time.  Eventually it was acted on.

A thunderstorm rolled on in and it really was quite a noisy one for the Seattle area.  She screwed up her courage and did as she had been advised by an old trusted friend.  (This is the part where I crawled under the bed and pretended to not know the woman.  “Nope, never met her,” while waiting for the third crowing of the rooster but it seemed a wise option under my adolescent circumstances.)

She went out on the front porch and defied the elements.  The wind was whipping through her hair, the rain pelting her face, and the blue bolts crashed about her.  (The story has grown somewhat significantly through the years, but hey, it was traumatic so cut her some slack.)  She then raised a fist to the sky, and shouted at the top of her little petite lungs, “Satan, I rebuke thee.”

Silence.  Not from the sky, but certainly from me and her while we waited to see what happened.  Actually, all things considered, it is amazing she lived through the experience.  My father was a bit crazy about my mother; okay, he was madly in love, and she had lots of jewelry.  Real jewelry.  Do you realize what a great conductor 14K gold is?  She was a human lightning rod! 

But it worked.  For awhile anyway.  She wasn’t afraid for probably ten years.

Then we moved to Michigan.  She was involved in helping with this move.  That probably was a really bad idea in the spring.  We were in the Upper Pennisula near the Mackinaw Bridge and there was a tornado watch.  Forget the watch though.  There was the most amazing lightning storm I have ever seen in my life.  It totally lit up the entire sky like it were noon.  The bolts were huge and they were impressive.

We got to the motel about 2am, deciding to not cross that horrible bridge in the middle of the night during that vicious of a storm.  The last I saw of her for a couple of hours was her back scrambling into the motel room in tears, with a bottle of scotch firmly grasped in her hand.

Two hours later I went over to see how she was doing.  She was fine.  Quite fine actually.  The bottle wasn’t full any more - actually it wasn’t even close to full.  She wasn’t drunk - not by a long shot - which shows what adrenaline can do when mixed with scotch, but she didn’t care about the storm anymore. 

I have asked her over the years if she had considered rebuking Satan again.  She always manages to change the subject.  She still is terrified of storms but doesn’t have to face them too often.  But I don’t know if I can ever hear a clap of thunder, see a bolt of lightning, or see a bottle of scotch without thinking of the woman on the front porch, wired as a lightning rod with thousands of dollars of jewelry, rebuking Satan.

Lightning at Night
Rife, Joseph B.
24 in. x 18 in.
Buy this Photographic Print at AllPosters.com

Adelle Tilton