(Personal journal entry for 2015-04-03)

07:15    FRIDAY

Ohmygosh, I love this weather! This morning has been great so far, and last night was awesome too! Well, let’s start with this morning…

The kids are on Spring Break so there was much less traffic on the way to work. It’s also much quieter. It’s darker than normal because of the overcast skies. It’s warm; ~55°F at seven in the morning. It’s not raining as much as it is ‘misting.’ There’s a slight fog which gives a feeling of calming mystery… you know, like those shots in those old movies in Paris at night, fog, streetlights softly glowing off of wet cobblestone… an alley cat here, a person sipping coffee in a street café there… This morning gave me that same feeling. In fact, I drove with my window all the way down so that I could experience the calm; hear the silence, smell the rain, feel the mist. It even smelled a little different than the normal way rain smells (which is amazing anyway). It smelled more ‘iron-y.’ Maybe like worms or mud. A lot like standing on the shore of a great body of water like Lake Erie… yeah, like that. And of course, the frogs and birds provided a perfect soundtrack to the whole experience.

-Let’s go back to yesterday evening now. It had stormed on and off throughout the day but by sunset, it had stopped raining for a short time. Mostly cloudy, but letting through a tiny bit of fading light, adding just a bit of color. It was warm, around 60°F or so. Ella and I were playing outside just messing around, playing games like ‘eye-spy.’ We found our way over to the ‘pond’ next to our house and the church. Ella was trying to sneak up on the frogs (I didn’t realize the frogs were awake already!), but that never works; they’re too fast. She found a ton of snail shells and began collecting them. We noticed a bat had begun his evening feast by flying over the pond where he (she?) would find plenty of bugs to snack on. The cool thing about bats is that they use echolocation to help find insects. Knowing this, we played a little game with the bat by throwing small shells into the air, tricking him to think they’re bugs. He would find the shell in the air and since it was falling, try to dive after it. He would swoop down right over our heads forcing us to duck down! We thought it was so fun… we had a (genuine) blast playing with the bat for a good 20 minutes or so. It was honestly, great fun…

-later that night, the storms returned. It was dark; around 10-11pm. The rain was falling hard and the lightning was far-off and sporadic. The thunder was intense though. You could feel it literally rolling under your feet as it rumbled by. I stood in the darkened kitchen with my head resting on the sill, smelling the air, listening to the rain, and feeling the warm breeze for nearly half an hour. I wanted to stay there forever. All I could do though is take in as much as I could in order to record it today in this notebook to remind me in the future that I, indeed, experienced those fleeting minutes in heaven.