That leading edge of the system was over us some hours ago. I drifted in and out of sleep being reawakened with each passing storm cell embedded within the larger system.
From where I lay slumbering the sound of the storm comes to me from three different sources, each separated by time and space.
The window over my bed on the eastern wall of my apartment brings the flash of lightening and the sound of the rain falling in the street and parking lot. The vent in the ceiling of the bathroom across the hall and a few feet down has a sheet metal cap that provides a sort of muted high-hat or snare drum sound as rain strikes it; hail is particularly impressive. The windows at the western front of the apartment, which I leave open for fresh air to balance the mechanical taste of the A/C, brings thunder and the sound of rain draining from the roof through the broken gutter along the southern edge of the roof and the still-functioning downspout, both channeling water onto the brick pavement of the courtyard below. There is also the much more subtle sound of rain falling directly onto the courtyard garden and its recovering banana plants damaged in the winter, cut back to the ground by the maintenance crew, and now recovering with ever-broadening leaves twisting up and out of the central stalks.
Lying there, eyes closed, this sonic landscape is a wonder to experience. First brought to wakefulness if not fully awake by the muted rose-white flash of lightening colored so as passes through my eye lids on the way to my visual cortex, I hear the thunder follow. If it comes down the hall from the western windows I can "see" the front arriving from that direction, if it is indeed arriving. Sometimes storms pass to the west of us with all the Shakespearean sound and fury it can muster. This time, well, this time repeated strikes tell me the storm is headed for me.
Then the bathroom vent tells me rain has arrived, light and tentative at first, an introductory few bars for what is to come. It's funny how I can tell the relative size of the drops, whether they are gust driven or merely falling, their terminal velocity ended on the vent cap. And the hail . . . there is no denying hail, rare though it may be, as it strikes that sounding cap.
The first lightening strike on the east side of the building lights my bedroom, its thunder shakes the windows, the sound arriving milliseconds later from the vent and the front windows, each sounding different, each woven into a richer, deeper sound that creates a scene of the world outside my little room, a scene that I inhabit simultaneously both inside and outside in that moment. The echo of the thunder rebounding from the few high rise buildings downtown adds a temporal dimension that both confuses and sharpens the scene in my mind.
The front moves east. The lightening recedes with it, thunder becoming muted with distance, my semi-automatic counting of seconds to gauge distance showing me trajectories, distances, velocities. The sound of rain on the vent cap takes over. The dripping of eaves, of broken gutters, of downspouts supplanting the overeager majesty of lightening and thunder. I return to sleep counting not sheep but sound, receding, drawing me back down until the next cell arrives to wake me.
