Relative Something

Yesterday afternoon I drove home through some crazy March Minnesota weather and lived to tell about it. The weather was pretty amazing but the highest threat to my well-being was a crazy driver who raced through heavy traffic at break-neck speed, weaving through four lanes of almost bumper to bumper cars and trucks, narrowly accommodated by all the other drivers who somehow braked in the nick of time to avoid catastrophe.

I can only hope the person putting everyone else in danger was facing an utmost emergency that necessitated the scary choice of behavior.

Beyond that incident, the rest of the wild drive was all weather-related. It started calmly enough with occasional random sprinkles of rain and just enough road-spray from traffic to keep my windshield messy. I hadn’t even made it halfway when brake lights started lighting up as rain started to fall with intensity. There was a flash of lightning.

In a blink, the sky became eerily dark as the heavy downpour brought visibility down to a vague glimpse of the taillights of the car in front of me.

As quick as it started, the rain stopped. The dark sky evolved to a dreary grey. In a few more miles the world took on a strange orange glow as somewhere high above the sun was bathing the blanket of clouds that were hugging the ground.

When I reached the fields around our neighborhood, the few remaining patches of snow looked like they were spewing smoke into the air above them. Clouds of moisture were rising off the cold snow as the temperature reading on my dashboard indicated 57°(F).

At the last turn onto our road, the sun was shining through broken clouds as the weather forecaster on the radio talked about the snow accumulation expected out of this system just to our north and the tornado watch issued for our county and all the others in three directions around us.

It felt like our house was in line for some of the hail and drama that was already being reported upwind of our area but in the end, the worst of the storm slid around our location.

That was a welcome outcome after the wild ride that preceded it.

.

.