Relative Something

Shortly before midnight on Monday night, I was having a very interesting dream, the gist of which I have now totally forgotten, likely because the dream was abruptly interrupted by a curious booming sound. It was thunder.

There is a brief period of transition from asleep and dreaming, to being awake, when logic has yet to establish firm footing. I raced right through that confused state of mind when the next bright flash and booming thunder snapped me to attention. That was when I realized we weren’t experiencing one of those rare thunder-snows. I was hearing a full-fledged downpour of rain, …in January. I have never witnessed anything like it in my entire life. It was pouring. A deluge. It included continuing lightning strikes, (we counted 7 in all), in about 15 minutes of roaring rainfall. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if this fell as snow.

I was like a little kid, running from window to window, trying to take it all in. This was an exceptionally dramatic weather event for me. Where was all this water going to go, with our ground frozen solid? I wondered if we might lose electricity. While I was still able, I hopped online and summoned a radar image.

There was a pretty big area of sleet that funneled down to a small tail of the classic green, yellow, and red of a thunderstorm, and that was centered right on top of us. It looked to be only about a couple of miles wide. Hmm. Aren’t we special?

We chuckled over suddenly having two cats show up in our bed, looking for some extra cuddles, a lot like the way children are known to act during a thunderstorm.

Yesterday afternoon, Cyndie and I took a walk to survey the aftermath and decided the rain was a good thing, even though it trashed the snow, and turned our roads into a nightmare of icy-ness. With the rainfall unable to soak in, it provided a perfect graphic representation of the drainage in the area we are planning our fences.

The spot where we cleared out the brush and created a small runway appears to work wonderfully. Then there is an area where the wetness spreads out a bit, before coming together again, right where we expected it to. The stakes that our fence contractor put in to identify the drain path are smack-dab in the middle of the wettest spots.

The whole experience was pretty exciting, if maybe a bit unnerving. It’s going to delay the start of our paddock fence installation for a while, but we learned a little something out of the event.

This is the second time since we moved here, last October, that our sleep was interrupted by a dramatic thunderstorm. With the house situated on the high point of our property, I’m not entirely surprised. It’s just that we haven’t been here during the normal time of year for thunderstorms yet. I wonder what’s in store for us when springtime finally arrives?