It was a dark and stormy night

Hell that’s like every single story should start even though it was actually a real dark and stormy night. The lights on the house flickered once, flickered twice and flickered one last time. Lightning flashed across the western horizon, the thunder was immediate .Doing the math from old wives tales, my mom told me that antidote when she was a young wife, I figured the storm was another 10 or 15 minutes away. In retrospect, the weather patterns on the West Coast have no similarity to those my mom tried to pretend to know when we were kids. One thing we did keep know for sure, was that if you could see the underside of the leaves there was a storm brewing. And in their true hour of disbelief, we were led to believe that’ some angelic figures were bowling way up there in the clouds.

In that little row house on Delta Avenue thunderstorms were a cause for celebration even if the storm came in the middle of the night. It’s not like we had a choice as nobody could possibly sleep through a storm such as this. Our dad was sound asleep as he had a few beers that evening. But mom was up and we kids were up as we sat on the front porch and watched the storm move in. The neighbor next-door came out on her porch as well as the storm seemed to have stirred her from her sleep.

Mrs. Byers was trimming the rosebushes at quarter after 12. A childhood memory surrounded me as I sat and watched the storm.