Storm Watchers

I have become a storm watcher. Not the weather kind, the human trauma kind. Emotional trauma, especially illness sweeps through your life, creating all kinds of havoc, then finds it way on down the road, or plays itself out.

This past weekend, we had a pretty good thunder shower. Oh it was not the world shifting event of my mother's dying of cancer (hurricane force winds) and it was not the tsunami that my eldest daughter's cancer created, or the month-long snow storm of Lincoln's NICU stay, but it was a pretty powerful little thunderstorm. It also ran across my property, but was mostly located on my daughter's property..we share a fence line. It clouded up and rained, and had moments when there was some pretty intense lightening (we may not be able to fix the hole in her heart with the implant.) A flash of dread, then the lightening is gone. Hitting nothing. They fixed the hole.

In the midst of watching my daughter, who has created some real storms in our lives, it was interesting to see her deal with the other side of the event...the waiting. She made it pretty clear she did not like this side of it. And as we waited and waited, peering down the hall towards the door behind which was our little Phoebe and the doctors who were patching her heart, I tried to let little snippets of storm watching hints drop on my daughter for the help she might need. Little pieces of news that are set backs need to handled with a "neutral" mind. Decisions have to made without the considerations of the previous decisions. Then you have to let it go, the could'a-should'a-would'a syndrome will kill you in these situations. So you watch the storm roll on and know that you will have to fix any of the damage later, but there is nothing you can do about it now.

So the storm rolled through. Very little damage, mostly good stuff. The air smells fresh and new, the ground underfoot has that spongy, healthy feel to it. You can see where the flowers will spring up in a day or so. It is the irony that where the storm hit the hardest, across the fence in my daughter's heart, is where the flowers will grow the tallest. Storm watchers know these things. It is good to know these things, but the training is brutal.

Godspeed out there to all the storm watchers and rained on residents. Spring follows the trauma of a good rain.
Don