Family, Fifty Words, Kids, Nature, Weather

It’s Raining, It’s Pouring – We All Fall Down

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It’s raining and thundering right now. The Irish Setter is burrowing into me on the bed, shaking and panting.  The shepherd mix is also on the bed, eyeing the other dog carefully.  As soon as the setter moves, the shepherd jumps up to police the situation.

What did your parents tell you about lighting and thunder when you were a kid?

39 thoughts on “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring – We All Fall Down”

  1. Rise and Look at the Rain Gauge Baboons,

    We have an inch in the gauge here. Perfectly timed. My tomato plants look marvelous.

    My dad explained the science to me when there were storms. Warm fronts, cold fronts, static electricity, the clash of warm and cold air, etc. Now and then he would joke about angels bowling, but I knew he was joking. I only remember being afraid if there was a tornado In the vicinity. (At that time Iowa and S MN had a number of tornadoes in a season).

    Once there was a lightening strike at the edge of our back yard and in the neighbor’s driveway. A lightening ball formed and rolled into their empty, open garage. The noise was tremendous followed by the smell of ozone. A black streak was left behind. It was something. The clap of thunder was immediate and all consuming.

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  2. Yeah, my dad was kind of an “explain the facts” kind of guy, but both parents said something along the lines of the gods are bowling as well. Or the Greek/Roman gods are fighting and their swords clashing made the thunder and lightning. One of my favorite books was about the Norse/Roman gods, so I enjoyed that explanation. But thunder and lightning still scared the crap out of me as a child.

    My dear husband is one of those that will make sure all of us are safely in the basement when the tornado sirens go off — but he will go outside to watch everything and take pictures.

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  3. My mother led with the “angels are bowling” line, but we were not a religious family so neither my sister nor I took this very seriously. I do wish the Irish Setter believed it!!

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  4. We have thunder and lightening down south here, hope it rains. I believe I’ll drive instead of bike this morning…
    Don’t remember what the folks told us, but I often remember this during a rainstorm, from my teen years:

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  5. My mother was always worried about tornados, so I grew up anxious about the weather. No bowling angels in our storms, just the potential for death and destruction. I vividly remember watching a downpour out of our living room window. I was very young, probably 4 or 5, and I feared it would rain so hard the Rock River would flood and sweep away our house. I recounted the Noah story to myself as a way to calm my fears.

    My dad, on the other hand, liked to stand in the open garage door during the worst of storms and watch the trees blow past. I like to do that now, too.

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  6. My folks didn’t talk about storms. I grew up regarding them as events staged for my amusement. Some seem vastly more threatening, depending on where you are. It doesn’t take a large storm to be terrifying if you are huddled in a tent in the Boundary Waters or bobbing around in a small boat on Lake Superior.

    One of my absolutely favorite memories is experiencing a thunderstorm that swept over where I lay in a hammock in the gazebo at our cabin. You don’t just watch a storm like that: you feel it, hear it and smell it. That sort of event . . . well, it stays with you forever.

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  7. We live in a valley and the only weather warning I remember was Dad saying if there was a tornado it would skip over us because of the valley. That is true, isn’t it??

    Oats and corn is all planted; working on beans!

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  9. Rainstorms literally put my life at risk. More accurately, when it rains, I put my life at risk. There’s a flat rubber roof on part of my 2nd story, right below which is a long flower box. The gutter spans the whole length and tends to get clogged during hard rains. The water, in turn, cascades down into my beautiful flowers in the flower box. What happens next is very upsetting: the rush of water fills the box and my plants literally float over the top and down to the ground. This kills them.

    The only way to save my flowers is to go out there, in the dark, pouring rain and make my way on the slippery rubber roof to the corner of it. It’s scary enough that I get down on my knees, then slowly crawl to the spot where my gutter catches all of the water. I then scoop out the clogged gutter spout.

    I used to take an umbrella to perform this task; last night I found a hooded rubber rain coat so venturing to the edge of my roof at least didn’t involve trying to carry an umbrella and a flashlight! I was relieved to find that, although the water filled the entire gutter due to a clog, it hadn’t quite reached the point where it’d cascade over the top.

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      1. Actually, I bet they do. CB has told about this before, and I, for one, fear that if she doesn’t quit doing this, we’ll read about her in the news. Stop it CB, no flowers are worth that.

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    3. Isn’t there a way to re-position or protect the flower boxes?

      I’ve just been reading a book about domestic house design. When indoor toilets were new they introduced smelly gas into bathrooms. Then somebody figured out a little bend in the sewage line would create a sort of plug to keep out the gas. Gutters now seem to me as stupidly designed as toilets with straight plumbing. Gutters inevitably clog, causing problems like you are experiencing or forcing homeowners to mount tall ladders to scoop out backed-up debris. Sheesh! There has to be a better way.

      Windstorms present problems to your property. High winds in the past have torn the dock up or blown moored boats halfway across the bay.

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  10. Not much. We were allowed to play outside during thunderstorms (in swimsuits, of course) and I vividly remember sitting in my upstairs bedroom window in St. Louis Park watching a tornado sweep eastward across Golden Valley toward Mpls.

    Of course, when things were really dangerous, we’d be in the SW corner of the basement like all obedient sheeple. 😉

    Chris in Owatonna

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  12. I love counting how long it takes from the time you see the lightning until the time you hear the thunder
    Thousand and 1 thousand 2, thousand 3… that lightning is 2 miles away then you count it again when you see the next lightning strike and find out but now it’s only 1 mile away

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  13. In the world I grew up in thunder and lightning were just another part of nature. There were risks. You took precautions. My parents, if I had asked, would have said just that. I did not really ask WHY about nature until about third grade. Encyclopedia gave me the answer to many such whys.

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  14. I enjoyed last night’s rain. Of course, I didn’t have to be outside in it.

    OT: my last day on the temp job was today. I spent a few weeks scoring 3rd grade English essays and found it incredibly boring. Then the last two days + an hour was spent scoring 6th grade math. The boredom of doing that almost totally eclipsed the boredom of scoring English. You would not believe how bad it was. Although, amazingly, some people seem okay with it. Today they announced that overtime was available tomorrow and there was one guy who was practically jumping up and down with excitement at the thought of doing this work more than the required 40 hours. I will never understand some people.

    Now I look forward to going outside to shoot (photos) and just to offset my lack of creativity the past month, I think I’ll do some wild and crazy editing of the photos.

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  15. I don’t recall when I began to look for scientific answers to anything. I do know that before I did, I had many false ideas. For instance, I thought that the leaves moving on trees was what caused wind, and not the other way around. I do know that dad always sought to make us comfortable in nature. I learned to not be fearful of the dark by being taken on walks through the local park after dark. As a youngster who set to sea at fifteen, he had been self-reliant most of his life, and he deliberately sought to pass that on to my sister and me.

    Living as we did, a short distance from a large body of water, we learned early on to be comfortable in and near water. And the small, close knit neighborhood I grew up in was conducive to fellowship. Thunder and lightning storms, especially those that occurred in the middle of the night, became occasions for social gatherings.

    Lights would come on in neighboring houses. Men would get dressed, and one by one make their way to the water’s edge. There they’d congregate and enjoy the unobstructed view of the lightning over open water. Women, usually in bathrobes with sleepy pj clad kids in tow, would gather in a neighbor’s kitchen. Candles would be lit – you never knew when the electricity was going to go out – and Madam Blå, the ever present coffee pot would be put on the stove. Tordenkaffe – thunder coffee – was obligatory at these in the middle of the night gatherings. To this day I miss these communal rituals of reassurance, and to this day, I associate thunder and lightning with them.

    Last night’s storm had me reminiscing about Daisy, our late yellow lab. She was a pitiful, shivering mess when thunder and fireworks were in the air. Bernie isn’t bothered in the least, and neither is Martha.

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      1. She was, Bill. I never thought I’d miss her because I really didn’t want her in the first place. But she was such a gentle and sweet creature, how could you not love her?

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