I have never done this before. I have never before stood out a storm. Oh, I’ve watched them from doorways and through windows; I’ve even been caught out in them, in the woods, in the hills; I’ve held down tents against them on camp sites that had so little soil as to risk washing us away along the lie of the bedrock and on others where we risked sinking into the mire; I remember sitting out one in a cattle-creep under a railway line wondering if the metalwork above me would be a help or a catastrophe in the event of a direct strike; but this was the first time that I deliberately walked out into the rain, under the flashes, between the crashing noise, to stand in the storm.
And to stay there until it passed.
There was no reason. Unless we count the heat of the day.
It had been a HOT day. Even up on the coast, where we might have expected a cold fret or at least a cooling onshore breeze, the mercury had topped 30 degrees C. This is England. This is May. We were complaining about the cold at the beginning of the month, but this was not what we meant when we asked for warmth. We wanted bright sun, light winds, that Goldilocks boundary between warm and cool. We wanted walking weather, not stay-indoors-stifling threat-of-wildfires weather. To even be thinking about the possibility of wildfires in England still feels absurd, to be thinking about them in May makes no sense to someone of my generation. Cast ne’er a clout, ’til May be out was a saying that we could more reliably attribute to the month than the blossom when we were young. No longer.
In the classroom we were persuaded to close the doors and trust to the aircon, until it was clear that the machinery was not up to the job. I was visibly melting and certainly incapable of thought, never mind creativity, before our statutory 7 minutes was up. As subtle as I could manage, I asked if anyone was feeling the benefit of the aircon…JW was on his feet to open the door behind me before the first head-shakes had registered. The little breeze thus enticed into the room was a caress of kindness across the back of my neck.
From there, we walked into a marsh that felt more brittle than damp. Reeds standing like so many unstruck matches, waiting. We were warned about drinking enough water, keeping to the shade once we reached it. Hats and sunglasses, long sleeves, covering up when the urge was to peel off. Sweating.
We respond differently in the heat. For some the urge was to pause frequently. My instinct was to keep going. If the air wasn’t up to streaming over me, perhaps I could create the illusion of a breeze by moving through it.
We were aiming for the bird hides, which would get us out of the sun at least. Surprisingly (to those of us who spend little-to-no time in such places) they were not stuffy, hot, sheds, but airy spaces, that drew cooler air off the surface of what little remained of the scrape pools, pulled it through the shadows, across skin aching to drink it in.
The dim light was welcome relief to eyes that had struggled despite peaked caps and darkening, polarising lenses.
Swallows flitted across the view in front of our supposedly hidden vantage point, and then through our open shed-visors, over our shoulders, to perch in the rafters, perhaps as glad of the cool as we were – for all they spend half of the year in far hotter climes.
I wondered if – if the heating continues – will there come a time when their migration pattern might shift, a time when we might become their winter grounds and they head further north in the summer. The northward drift of migratory patterns is already being seen in butterflies, the birds cannot be many generations behind.
For now, though, they come in Summer and frolic in the insect-rich air over what still passes for pools and marshland. They come into our buildings and nest. They chirrup with something sounding like conversation. Perhaps they’re asking what on earth we’re doing in here. It would be a fair question. Getting out of the sun, feeling the breeze, and listening to you would be an equally fair answer.
There were others to watch. I didn’t bother to seek out the spoonbill. I was delighted by the wagtail. When someone whispered that it sounds like a bittern, I figured ‘wishful thinking, but take that thought home if it makes you happy. It sounded more like cattle to me. The dark brown herd over the way.
I’m not a birder. I’m not really a photographer. I’m not the sociable kind of writer either. I wanted to stay in the hide, where the cool air comforted me, and – if I had been able to settle – the window-defined image would have inspired me in its own way, I really wanted to write…and/or I really wanted to just sit and look at the green reeds close to the water, the shadows and reflections of birds beneath their actual selves, to listen to the swallows, to catch the flit of a damselfly, the sound of all that life around us – except the human variety. Above everything else I wanted, I wanted people to shut up! Stop talking. Stop stating the obvious.
Yes, swallows are delicate and their migration is amazing.
I’m sure your companion is such easy company – tell him tonight over beer or hot chocolate.
Whether that is such a good shot or not won’t be known until afterwards, and then only by comparison with all the others from today.
I don’t care where you’ve come from, or how often you come here.
I might be inhuman. I might wish that all your chitter chatter were just warbling, so I might think it were as pretty as the Chetty’s outside. Maybe I wouldn’t like that as much if I actually understood the mundanity of it.
For all the comfort of the hide…I went back outside to the heat and the Chetty’s warbling…and the small purple flowers hunkering among the slender shade of reed stems. Being hot, hot, hot, was somehow preferable to enduring human whittering.
I found a seat. Sat. Scribbled. Got hotter. More frazzled. I was not designed for this climate.
I did not stay for lunch, but got the first bus back, the next train from the station.
Came home.
Showered.
Not a get-clean shower, just a get-cool shower. Just tepid water. No soap or scrubbing.
Pulled on an oversized t-shirt and sat outside waiting for the heat to go out of the day. Watching the haze not yet forming actual clouds. The forecast for ten degrees cooler tomorrow seeming unlikely. Picking at food because it was still too hot to think about actual meals, never mind the cooking of them.
I came indoors.
I went to the corner shop and bought chocolate.
I watched a repeat on TV that I didn’t remember seeing before.
I was thinking about going to bed, when I heard the rain. It was the sound of rain that pulled me to open the back door…the thought of the petrichor, of the earth breathing in and out again after its long held breath through the heat of the last few days. I pulled on sandals and walked across the deck in the soft summer rain.
The drops became larger, less soft. I took off my sandals to stand on the grass. The sky flashed white with lightning somewhere high beyond the clouds. Then a fork below them. The crashes coming nearer, but circling round, from west to east via a southern arc. The rain kept falling. I thrilled at each lightning bolt – the ones that lit the whole sky and the ones that split and forked – and left trails on my retina. The grass cool beneath my feet. The rain washing away the day’s heat, not just from skin, but – maybe – from memory, mind, soul. From the land.
I’m sure this is the first time that I have deliberately, intentionally, mindfully, stood in the rain.
It’s not a thing we do, in England, in May.
I’m wearing a t-shirt and denim shorts. I am listening to individual raindrops on the bramble hedge. I am watching the lightning fork and sheet the sky. I am not thinking.
It is raining. And I am standing in the dark of my garden. Barefoot.
At some point, I realise that I am smiling.
At some (other) point, I realise that I am tracking the storm as it passes, from west to east, but a little to the south of me. I turn through the compass points to keep it in front of me. The rain eases. I don’t feel wet. Or cold. Only soothed.
I stay until the flashes and crashes have moved away, dragging the rain behind them. By the time I come indoors I am laughing out loud. Delighted. Joyful. Relishing the absurdity of it. The refreshment of it. The newness of having stood out a storm, albeit a small, by-passing one.
Or perhaps, I think, a day or two later, it had nothing to do with the storm, and everything to do with the rain. The water cool on skin. The sky touching me on its way to earth. The being part of something as simple and as massively important as being welcomed into the rain at the end of a day that needed it.
