Navigation

Isherwood: To Love Storms

To love storms is a sick and criminal attitude, up there with picking your nose, scratching your butt and sleeping with dogs.

How I acquired my sense and love for storms is self-explanatory, to confess being a farmkid. A farmkid is somewhere between a juvenile delinquent, a reform school graduate, a biker and a thug, except no hoodie and no tattoos, if maybe skin cancer. A creature who by this single flaw of their nativity is denied all the codes and statutes of self-preservation included in the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution as well as any pleasant aspects of the Ten Commandments. You can do to a farmkid things that are illegal to perform on every other human type including those only approximately human as well as most higher animals, that being angleworm and above.

My reference here is farm chores, that long, endless, to add groady, this hideous list as constitute the average farmkid’s life. It was that farmkids knew eternal life existed long before it became a theological brand because farm chores are eternal, farm chores are everlasting. The only punctuation from which is rain as gets in the way of haying; rain interrupted potato digging, rain detoured cultivation, thunder and lightning-halted irrigating by hand lines, all of these were adjourned at the intervention of a storm. Big, noisy, lots of sparks, full of racket, ground shaking…storms.

It is my sense that Christianity, to include Islam and Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism, rarely pictures God as an out-loud, noisy, guitar-playing deity with the bass turned up full. Never is God rollicking, tipsy, toasted, like as not licking the flagpole and kissing the neighbor lady. Religions generally do not condone this vision of their gods, as doesn’t stop a kid, particularly a farmkid, from going off reservation as far as religion is concerned.

As a kid I thought storms were God’s way of doing Saturday night, a touch of the ol’ cider barrel, polka music wound up on the radio, a banjo night out on the porch and let her rip. Short of four semesters of physics, this explained storms, explained lightning, thunder and downpours. It was my grandmother Adah who started this particular thought process when she said thunder was God rolling out the barrels. Despite ours was a solid Methodist household I did know what barrels were for, not just 10W-30, not 80 weight gear oil, not only 2,4-D, but whisky, hard cider and wine.

When you are born Methodist of the original patent, any form of alcohol is a long ways from home plate. I remember the sermons those long Sunday mornings at Liberty Corners Methodist, the minister patiently explaining how the wine of Jesus was really grape juice, how it remained grape juice unsullied by air-borne yeasts that are everywhere. Apparently a similar logic explained the virgin birth. There is in theology an uncorrupted universe with no sex and no wine; wine, after all, is spoilage. I have thought since that what I listened to as a Methodist kid constituted a form of child abuse.

By good luck I had a Germanic grandmother who said thunder was God rolling out the barrels, empty barrels, which made sense of thunder and lightning, of God playing an air guitar Van Halen style.

So my education to storms. It is that I like to picnic during a storm. Recently I was at friends for supper on the back patio. It was sprinkling – my hostess said it was too bad it was raining, I thought it perfect. I like to sleep in a tent in a storm, drive a car in a storm, sit on a porch in a storm; blizzard, rain, lightning, power-outage, the sensation is dessert-like to me. If the truth is storms cause farm chores to quit for a while. The chance to curl up with a book in a treehouse with a candle for light snuggled under a mousy old quilt.

I believe Jesus screwed up when he described heaven as a place of many mansions. I sure to hell hope he is wrong, heaven as a suburb doesn’t appeal to me, an upper crust one at that. Better if heaven is that treehouse with a candle for a companion, a book to read, a quilt for comfort while outside it is raining cats, dogs, llamas and chickens.

As I remember, it didn’t even matter if the roof leaked, which is how you measure love.

Article Comments