Summer Thunderstorms

When I was a kid, thunderstorms used to arrive after sweaty, stifling summer days, loud and booming, crazy and cooling. We would be just getting out of the pool, a summer day that seemed never-ending, a day that consisted of visiting my grandparents, lunch outside at the picnic table, watching my mother garden, watching The Monkees on TV. Then the evening would come, and the storm just behind it, in time for our family to gather around the table, eat dinner, still ramped up on the excitement of not having school for what seemed like forever....

I can still smell the chlorine from the pool, the fresh cut grass, the dinners my mom would cook. I can still hear my neighbors, Mark and Henry, shouting next door, their house invisible behind the tangles of blackberry bushes that grew in the space between. I remember picking those berries, stealing some right off the bush, the taste of them as huge a treat as ice cream.

The storm we're having tonight is nothing like it, and I'm nowhere near my childhood home. But I still can picture exactly how it used to be, as clearly as if it were yesterday. I don't think any adult summer, no matter how fabulous, can ever measure up to those magical days when we were kids.