Thunderstorm

Tonight in Minnesota, we are having our first thunderstorm of this early spring. Birdie was already sacked out in her nest, and Julie and Joe had just closed their second book and were chatting about what Joe had done today that was fun ("put a book on a bucket"--your guess as good as ours, Fans), when the first rumblings of thunder were heard. Julie loves a thunderstorm, especially if she is tucked up inside, and even more so if night has already fallen and she is tucked inside because it's all ever more cozy then. So she gasped in delight and said to Joe, "It's a thunderstorm! I love thunderstorms!" Joe quickly got into the spirit of things, exclaiming excitedly every time he saw the lightening. Ted came in from the kitchen. We'd not been sitting there very long when the wind blew the porch door open which made us all tromp out to the porch, which is when we realized that we should close the windows. Joe scampered back inside, but in a delighted way. After Ted came back in, he settled in on the couch, too, and turned off the light so we could better see the rain pouring down. Before too long, Joe said he was ready to go to bed, and off he went, on his "own two little feet" tonight.

Yesterday evening, Joe and Ted were tracing sailboats from Clara's old Black on White and White on Black very first board books, which led Ted to comment that there were a lot of things he'd been privileged to do growing up, that Joe probably wouldn't get to do for one reason or another. That's probably true, though who can say if sailing like it weren't no thing will be one of those things? (After all, Julie has just got to be able to use nautical terms in the proper setting one of these days!) But if it is true that circumstances may conspire to prevent us from giving our children all the experiences we had, or might want them to have, it is also true that they may operate to give them others that will prove to have more meaning than we might have imagined, or have hoped. It is also true that it seems all too often, you don't know when you are in the midst of making a memory you will remember always, and this seems especially true when it comes to those we make in childhood. Joe probably will not remember watching the beginnings of a thunderstorm when he was just a bit more than three and a half years old, but his life and Clara's will be filled with such things, some remarkable, and some remarkable only to them. Here Julie is thirty-five, and tonight, she made a memory, probably unremarkable to most, but one she thinks she'll keep for always.