Relative Something

Last night at the lake place, we received some pretty intense rainfall. A spectacular show of lightning kept us entertained just after sunset. The power went off briefly, but recovered and has been stable since. When we started to hear the pangs and clanks of hail, there was a hurried effort to rearrange vehicles to clear a spot in the second stall of the garage under cabin 3 so our friend, Rogie, could get his special car out of harm’s way. That is all it took to stop the hail. Never heard another whack after that.

One particularly dramatic moment came when someone spotted what looked like smoke coming from one of the landscape lights. We all squinted through the wet windows to clarify what we were seeing, and my first impression was that it didn’t look like steam from the hot bulb, as would be expected. It really looked like smoke! One opinion fed another and soon Cyndie was reporting that she saw sparks. A moment later, I was sure that I saw flame. Could it be that some part of the wiring was short circuiting out there in the rain?

Cyndie jumped when she heard ‘flame’ and ran to do something; I didn’t know what. I walked out the door into the rain and over toward the light to investigate. Just like Mike said, it wasn’t sparks or flame, it was the rain drops hitting the light and splashing up. The “smoke” was actually steam, after all. Just goes to show the power of the mind to perceive what it expects to see. I was so sure I had just seen flames from inside looking out.

Then I looked up, still in the falling rain, to realize that Cyndie had run through the cabin to the basement door, out to grab the garden hose, and had arrived to put water on it. In the rain. I thought that was pretty funny. She was just as convinced as me that we had a burning landscape light on our hands.

The whole place took quite a pounding last night from the heavy thunderstorm. So did the accuracy of my perceptions. It serves as a convenient reminder that things may not always turn out to be exactly as they might appear.