Blood poured down my nose onto my shirt and to the soil below. I thought for a second that maybe the nutrients in the redness that I saw would be appreciated by the life around. Maybe even the plant that I was putting into the ground could swallow it up with its roots once I covered them with soil and patted it down. The image of a human like plant sticking its tongue out to gather the iron came to mind, but I soon realized that this was not possible and awoke.
It was 4 o’clock in the morning and I laid there in my bed beneath the window sill. Steady drips of water bounced down onto my head but with the temperature above 90 and the high humidity I made no attempt to move. Boom! Loud cracks, whistles and crunches made their way into the room where I laid, the flickering of light a constant dance on the walls around me. In a daze I slowly sat up to see what the commotion was. I turned my body to face the window and stood up to lean on the sill. I looked out the window with heavy eyes and to my amazement the rains had come.
A hundred yards off I could see lightning, each strike licking the ground. The booms would follow but before the sound could reach my ears three more cracks of lightning could be seen flashing their way down. I couldn’t tell where the storm was coming from, only that I sat right in the middle of it. Amazed by the light and sound in the sky I watched nature hard at work. I thought about how such a scene was created, the winds and temperatures in perfect alignment, but the thing that kept coming to mind was the surrounding trees that might land on my head if they were to fall. A crash, a thud, dead. Still it was beautiful.
Once I had watched the display for a while I crawled back into bed for that precious last hour of sleep before it was time to pull myself up for work. I quickly drifted off, dreaming of the Redwoods back home in California and the damage they could do. 20 homes flattened by one tree.
That morning many trees lay on the ground. Black marks split their way down trunks and brush and leaves covered the slippery roads. With the wetness that sat in the air there remained a sense of freshness and relief by the life around and within ourselves knowing that our plants were safe.
