Midday Report, July 23, 2020

I am sitting in a folding chair immediately behind my parked automobile in something a three-foot space between the automobile and the overhead door opening.

The overhead door is up.

Sitting here is not a normal part of my daily routine.

The sonorous rumblings of thunder brought me out here.  When I first heard the thunder from inside my house, it sounded as though timpani drums were raining down and hitting the ground outside my house.  I peered out my front door and saw a rather conspicuous and bruised-looking storm is elbowing out of the mountains and trying to spill out onto the valley.

Sitting just inside my garage with the door open is my version of a front row seat.

At present the wind is blowing from the east.  That means a lot more of the storm is behind the fists and shoulders and knees of clouds I see jostling above half the valley.  Rising to climb the Rocky Mountains just west of me, the storm impulse is sucking air from the valley.  Hence, wind from the east.

As my creek (crick) fishing buddies from East Helena, Montana, used to say at times like these: “We’re gunna git it!”

I am reminded—for obvious reasons—of the time someone asked, “Mitch what type of cloud is that?”  Not recalling a cirrus from a stratus, I answered: “I think that is a bunny cloud.”

These are grizzly bear clouds.

Anyhow, I intend to sit out here and watch the wind running its fingers through the grass and squeeze the trees.  I want to watch curtains of rain falling across the valley.  I want to smell the sage at wet prairie earth when rain finally arrives here.

I have the time.

—Mitchell Hegman