.
It came suddenly and darkly. I was napping and the day seemed lost in heat and errands. Then the sky turned and things seemed possible again.
My love of storms is endless. They are important to me. They make me feel small, and I like that.
I stood at the door that is a window in my kitchen and looked out, watching white clouds get pushed away by steely colored ones. I watched a whole bank of clouds enter and create a curly line across the horizon, so crisp and sure as it held the stormy sky above it and pushed the hot day below it down and away.
All this smallness and storm reminded me, then, of a passage from Sylvia Plath's Unabridged Journals. Despite my previous impression of Plath, her darkness, depression and death, I find her incredibly lucid and strangely logical in her journal writings. What an animal she was, afraid of her own animalness and in complete wonder and love over everything.
Passage number 85 on page 70. I won't include it here as I don't feel comfortable taking long passages from books. I think you should go read the book.
But I will tell you that she opens by writing: "The most vital spot in the world for me was today in the rain...", and goes on to describe a visit with her mother and grandmother in Marblehead, where there are ships and schooners, yellow flowers growing in wild grass and houses.
She cries on this day for the "love of kin."
And she ends with a promise: "Someday you will find your way back to that parking spot by the gravel drive, and you will remember how it was, so forever you can carry it in you as it was, giving life and a new sight in the rainy space of an hour."
A new sight in the rainy space of an hour. That is how I felt on the day of the thunderstorm. Watching the rain was "the most vital spot in the world for me."
I don't know if I have the storm or Plath to thank for that. And I don't want to know.
.
.
