We rushed our beach walk a little this morning after looking at the weather radar, left coffee unfinished and paper unread, to get it in before the rain came.  Wide smooth beach, combed by southwest winds, littered again by dead jelly fish.  Rain arrived a half-hour after we returned home, accompanied by rolling thunder, but no local lightning.  We love morning thunderstorms.  The only thing better than a morning thunderstorm is one at night out in the ocean.  With distance you can see whole storms, and get a clear picture of how fierce they can be.  The light show is spectacular, crackling flashes lighting up the ominous shapes of clouds, nature’s distant artillery barrage.  Sometimes we’ll pull up a chair and watch for the duration.

And then there’s Heat Lightning.  Remember heat lightning?  I don’t know about the rest of the country, but that was a common term growing up in Florida, referring to a mostly July and August phenomenon of nights too hot to bear, flashes of lightning in the distance with no thunder or rain.  As a kid you just accepted that it was caused by things just being so hot, lightning formed.  Hell, the name of it said everything you needed to know.  Well, after a lifetime of this acceptance, I started thinking about the phenomenon in more detail a few years ago, and looked it up.  Here’s what Webster’s says:  vivid and extensive flashes of electric light without thunder seen near the horizon esp. at the close of a hot day and ascribed to far-off lightning reflected by high clouds. So it’s not quite what we thought, not the almost magical, heat-induced occurrence of lightning in the sky without a storm. Oh, it’s heat-induced alright, as all thunderstorms partially are, and it turns out that’s just what it is.  A thunderstorm.  Only so far away you can’t hear the thunder, the flashes reflected in cloud tops.  Still wonderful, but I was a little disappointed.  Heat Lightning was always the visual manifestation of the mysterious relationship of a kid with nature, a special phenomenon that defied explanation, yet indicative of an understanding of the universe that pre-dated and superseded book knowledge.  Too much?  Maybe.  But there is nevertheless a sadness in letting go of my old acceptance.  So maybe I won’t.  The same goes for smelling rain before it arrives.  Remember that?  Still do it?  Well, I made the mistake of looking that up, too.  Turns out, like heat lightning, you do and you don’t; it is and it isn’t.  What you’re smelling is ions released from the ground due to changes in electrical fields as a storm approaches.  Still crazy, but not as satisfying.  I know, and water droplets reaching critical mass and hooking up with gravity explains rain, but it’s still water falling out of the sky, and I can’t think of anything freakier than that.

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