Compost Studios

The crash of thunder startled us awake at 5 a.m. on Saturday morning. A pregnant pause followed, and then the clouds tore open and sent a deluge of rain splattering onto the roof.

As E closed windows and unplugged electronics, the world whitened and the thunder overcame the dull roar of rain a few more times. Petey paced and meowed but soon the rumbles were distant, the rain slower, and sleep beckoned again.

Saturday’s meteorological outburst was an uncommon experience for me here in Belgium, where lightning seldom seems to strike once, let alone twice. When I lived in Virginia, violent thunderstorms occurred regularly from March through September.

I’m no weather grrrl, but apparently the warm moist air off the Atlantic Ocean was always colliding with the cold fronts traveling south from Canada and as the two air masses fought for domination of the atmosphere, all hell would break loose below.

Most often the skirmishes would arise between late afternoon and midnight, with clouds gathering ominously during rush hour and exploding later to ruin barbeques and picnic plans. When my kids were small, the storms always seemed to unleash their sound and fury just as I was trying to get them to bed. Our solution was to let them sleep together so they weren't alone at night. It wasn’t unusual to have thunderstorms every day in the South during the spring, a bizarre nightcap for sure.

At best the storms were a nerve-jarring nuisance, at worst they left destruction in their wake. I never left the house in Virginia without unplugging the computer, printer, television, and stereo. Few surge protectors can handle what Mother Nature dishes out and on the morning after a bad storm, there would sometimes be a queue of folks with dead computers lining up at the local repair shop.

One morning when I was the first to arrive at the office, a fine plume of smoke snaked out of the disc drive of my computer when I booted it up. Oh my. The lightning surge had traveled into the building on the phone lines we used with our modems back then. Most of the phones were fried as well as several computers.

At my home in Virginia, we’ve spent thousands of dollars on tree services related to storm damage in the last five years. Once as I huddled in a central bathroom in the house with the kids, a violent wind shear cracked the tops off several substantial maple tree and left them dangling. We heard them pop above the roar of the wind. Even when damage wasn’t that extensive, large limbs might break and the yard would be littered with smaller branches and leaves.

When I was 12, my family lived in an old house in the mountains of Virginia, next to a mill with a creek falling behind it. That particular house used to blow light bulbs during a storm. The lightning would strike and you’d hear the bulb filaments pop. My poor mother would become slightly unglued. She was terrified of storms. Her mother, who had lived most of her life in a small village outside of Rome, Italy, had once been knocked off her milking stool in the barn when a ball of lightning rolled through. My grandmother passed her fear onto my mother, and I carried a small vestige of it with me into adulthood.

I’ve had several close encounters with tornadoes in Virginia and Oklahoma, two of them while driving in a car. The most memorable, however, occurred when my son was a baby and I was visiting a friend for a few days. I’d put my son down to sleep, and my girlfriend and I were watching a movie on television. Soon the broadcast was interrupted by weather bulletins warning of severe weather in our area. The wind whipped, lightning flashed, and rain began battering the windows. The weatherman announced that a tornado had been spotted and showed the location and expected path on a map on the TV screen.

I glanced at my friend and said, “It looks like it’s headed our way.” And just then thunder cracked, the TV screen went blank, and we heard sirens. Remarkably, my son was sleeping through the storm. His porta-crib was positioned next to an enormous window, and my girlfriend and I each grabbed an end of it and carried it into the hallway that ran down the center of the house. He never woke, and I hardly slept. What a pair. The storm raged most of the night and dumped 6 inches of rain on the area. A tornado struck within a mile of my girlfriend’s house and portions of the town experienced flash floods.

So the "gentle" storm we had in the Brussels area Saturday morning brought back memories and embedded a few amusing thoughts in this expat’s mind: Belgium is a very reserved country in every respect and the old saying, “Everything is bigger in America” applies even to the weather.

June 10, 2007