The Beautiful Storm

Despite the fact that New York seems poised to become The New Seattle (gee, thanks global warming), I do love the beautiful storm.

Beautiful?

The drip drip drip of drops on the outside provide rhythm and insistence, the curlique breeze that wends it ways through the barely cracked open window brings refreshment and even the general gloom casts the city in a pale that softens and shades the often harsh corners and edges of a city that must move at lightning speed if for no other reason than because it can.

There’s also certain kind of loveliness in the boom of thunder at 3 in the morning that is at once scary and also at the same time reassuringly beautiful to a child of Wisconsin. It causes one to burrow further under the covers finding companionship with the sheets and blankets wrapped around ones legs and arms causing a clutch of the pillow and a general gratefulness that one has a place to call home, that’s warm and dry, even if sometimes one doesn’t appreciate that place. And in and of itself, the storm, with it’s falling sheets of water and white grey splatter across the sky has a beauty of it’s own, swarming with emotion and angst, a Mother Nature temper tantrum that releases all the emotional toxins and sows and nurtures the Earth, cleansing and scrubbing, wiping away the grit and grime allowing a new day to be just on the horizon, just over There.

Almost. But not yet.

But beyond the beauty and the lovely, beyond the harmonic ideology and the paradigm of storms and their sweeping promise of the blessing of freshness, I am most grateful that I don’t have to go out into it. That I took the day off and have work, tea, a baggy sweatshirt and the rain to keep me company.

And that, perhaps, is the most beautiful thing of all.