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Damnation All Around

June Sky over Minneapolis
"Severe thunderstorms!", Public Radio reported.  "Already over the western suburbs.  Expect high winds and large hailstones."

Every time I hear something like that, I recall the time at Weyerhaeuser Grade School #303, in western Washington State, when our little band of learners came out of the "Old School" building on the back of the property, where we had played basketball, to find ourselves in a "severe thunderstorm", with lightning striking the fir trees just a few yards away, and where, for the first time in my life, I smelled sulphur in the air.  Damnation all around!

We dared not run across the gravelly ball field to our three-room, two-classroom, eight-grades "new" schoolhouse.  We stayed on the porch of the Old School, where my mother had said she went to school, to wait for Damnation to slack off.

Mostly, Western Washington, on the ocean side of the Cascade Mountains, simply leaked rain down on us, and occasionally, often in July and August, allowed the sun to shine down on our education and hay fields.
Storms were, for the most part, just unrelenting wind and rain.

Here in the Upper Midwest, storms are "systems" that have gathered themselves across the western half of the continent, meeting other systems, often up from the Gulf of Mexico, that roll across the great prairies like the wrath of god, thundering righteousness and retribution, with winds that might make an ocean proud of its relentless, rolling might.  It has been here, in the Midwest, that I learned what "straightline winds" are, in contrast to the tornadoes that trist trees into pretzels and houses into kindling.  So far as I can tell, when a tornado lies down on its side, and blasts, not in vertical spirals, but straight across the land, flipping trees down and roofs up, it is called "straight line winds".  That is not a scientific description:  a scientific description might say that "all hell is breaking loose".

I have come to think that the sky is not always a friend, allowing the sun to laze across from horizon to horizon, but the way howling blizzards get from Siberia and Canada to our town, and that put Gulf heat and water together with Pacific winds and Alaskan frost to make destructive concoctions.  A year or two ago, hailstones pounded our roof to shreds, and four garage doors to submission.

"I couldn't live in a place that does not have seasons!", our neighbors and friends say.  They mean they cannot imagine where United Air Lines got that "friendly skies" stuff.  Who wants to wake up and say, "Oh, damn!  Another beautiful day!"?

I do.  I still smell sulphur.  My friends and neighbors say that it is not the weather I smell, but my future.

That is scary, too.  It is all over the western suburbs.

Now, I am not inventing tales, when I say that, at this moment, the weather sirens are going off.

Is that sulphur I smell?

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