Lightning Strikes; Flashbulbs of an Overzealous Tourist God
It’s 3 O’clock in the morning and I’m sitting here listening to the thunder and rain as it rolls by. I’ve been awake the past hour; the thunder woke me up at 2 O’clock and so I stood on the balcony and watched the lightning streak across the night sky over the sleeping city. For the first 20 minutes or so the air was perfectly, unusually calm and still, and the lightning came in quick succession with the occasional, ripping, cracking peal of thunder punctuating the streaks like exclaimation marks. KkkcrrackkkkkkkBrrrroooommmmggggrrrwooooollllllllllllllllllllllllllll!
Then the rain started, buckets of it pouring in earnest, while the thunder continued to voice it’s complaints and the lightning lit up the night like flashbulbs of an over zealous tourist god looking down on our gorgeous city and taking snapshots.
This afternoon I stood in the back of the winery and looked across the valley to where I should see Mt. Hood. It was covered in smoke from the fires in Central Oregon and clouds were starting to pile in the sky along with a chilly breeze. “It’s going to rain tonight” I thought to myself, “that’s good for the vines, and the flower beds out in front of the winery won’t need to be watered”. I think I’m starting to approach life like a farmer - tonight when the thunder and lightning woke me up my first thought was, “lightning generates nitrogen - good - that’s good for the plants”. Then I started to wonder why lightning generates nitrogen (which my Grandma used to tell me all the time during lightning storms), so here I am at 3:20 a.m. reading about nitrogen fixation, and trying to find what I read previously in a book by Ruldoph Steiner about living nitrogen in the soil vs. dead nitrogen in the air.
My graham crackers and milk are gone now - and I think I have an idea of how the nitrogen cycle works, so it’s off to bed again, until the next time lightning and all of the million thoughts racing through my head wake me up again.
PS - I’ll explain the nitrogen cycle tomorrow to you all. It’s facinating.
