Everyday Canvas

Dark and Stormy

Prompt: It was a dark and stormy night. What happened? Thank you, Snoopy.

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It was as if the whole world trembled. Windows rattled with thunder, and the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by several violent gusts of wind that swept up the street into and over the stone wall. The darkness was pure, visionless, except for the occasional lightning tearing through the sky and haunting the underlings with bursts of blue, purple, and white light.

The night was dark and stormy all right, but the next day shone as if all the skilled painters in Heaven offered their brushstrokes to those of us on earth. Their creativity set the maples on fire, turned the oaks russet, and the beeches first yellow then to gold. Autumn’s brazen fire torched all the others, dogwoods, buttercups, cherries, into a palette of colorful light. This blissful imagery’s uproar lulled me into contemplation.

As living for me meant vision, the powerful flashes of lightning that blinded versus the lovely colors of the next day seemed to be joke, an extremist’s joke. Extremes hinted at a longing for death or violence, and I hated all extremes. Whoever created the vicious cycle of birth and death--of seasons, of people, of anything--had to be an extremist. Thoughts like this, when I told them to my mother, she washed my mouth with soap, and the priest gave me more Hail Marys than Mary herself would have liked.

So each year, in October, I decided inside my eight-year-old mind to skip town, the state, or if possible, the country, but then, sooner or later spring and summer arrived, and this decision together with all the other secret ones were put on hold. Who’d know then, that once I became of age, I would depend on the extremist this much and be grateful to Him all through my days, despite the dark and stormy nights and even those surprising bursts of fall colors, especially because nature in autumn encouraged my allergies!