From my brother, word of cleaning up the farm after a storm in Iowa. I hadn't heard about any inclemency there, since the middle part of the country gets little play against the cyclones and earthquakes at the nation's edges, much less when in competition with that whole mass transit/mass murder thingy across the pond.

I vaguely recall such phenomena from my disippating youth (fading into a twinkling blur like the bright trail of a comet, the imposing combustible part being the future). Thunderstorms were those things that we knew were coming, but about which we hesitated. Do we go into the basement? How does the sky look? What does the weather man say?

(Back then it was "the weather man," and we didn't have cable, and usually the power went out so you couldn't watch the storm approach on the news; you had to listen to the battery-operated radio in a box encased in red leather with a metal retractable antenna that you had to point in different directions to pick up whatever signals were out there.)

The crash and grumble of the grumpy sky sometimes came along at the darkest hours, when we watched the ceiling, flat on our backs, still as bunnies in the brush. A flicker of lightning became an all-encompasing white strobe and the resultant slam of clouds overhead made the house jump and our hearts with it. Thunder can be that loud, lightning that fierce. It would split trees in the woods, the ones we'd just climbed the day before. We didn't have toys out there for the wind to scatter, for the rain to ruin. Our world was our playground, and hearing it endure this spanking welled up merciless fear in our dreams.