**This entry is dedicated to a few people who especially can appreciate this memory: Libby, Emily, Molly, and Drew.
It is obvious that you would rather be a hurricane than a tropical storm, and since the hurricane of the week is named Charley, and since I stopped holding my breath that they were going to name a hurricane Charlsie back when I was 9, I think that the weather is a great thing to think about. My mother loves to watch the weather channel, we call her accu-kate. I read a book once (like last week) about a girl whose mood would alter the weather in certain circumstances (I like children novels). With me it is a little vis versa. But for the most part the only weather that really depresses me is cold and dark and for an extended amount of time. I like weather that changes. I love thunderstorms (although they scare me more now than the used to), and I love heavy rainshowers without the thunder (you can still swim, and swimming in the rain is the best, since the water you are swimming in is always warmer than the rain, at least in the south). It brings back deep, clear memories of being at the pool in the summer time, watching the clouds roll in, and praying that it didn’t thunder. And if it did thunder, you would have to get out of the pool. The pool where I grew up had concrete around most of it, but it had wood around part of it, mostly the deep end, and the wooden part is what comes to mind when I think about it raining at the pool (it would get kinda squishy when it was wet, even though it didn’t have to be raining for it to be wet). Most children wouldn’t still be at the pool at this point (there parents would come get them), because of the weather, but if you were a pool rat like I was (I walked to and from the pool), you would still be there. Hopefully, if it was going to thunder, it would thunder before it started to rain, so that your towel wouldn’t be soaked when you did actually have to get out (you might have been a forward thinking child and put your towel under cover before the rain started to fall, but I don’t remember being one of those children). So it would thunder and you would reluctantly get of the pool, and sit under the cover with the lifeguards, watching the drops splash in the pool and crash on the concrete, and soak into the wood, wrapped in your wet towel. After a while, it would occur to you to dig through the lost and found and find a dry towel, which would smell musty, like the rest of the things under the cover. The lifeguards would let you borrow a stopwatch (used for swim practice) to time how long in between the thunder strikes. In this particular memory there is no lightening, just thunder, and you don’t understand why you can’t get back into the pool since there isn’t any lightening, but it is a rule you are pretty used to, so you don’t argue. After a while the lifeguards would always try to persuade you to call your mom to come get you, but you would hold out, convinced that the storm would blow over. Depending on which part of the summer the storm occurred would determine how long the lifeguards would deal with you. If you had spent every day there for the past two and a half months, their patients would be growing thin and they would be calling your mom for you, asking you when you started school, etc. But, the less other kids around, the more tolerant the lifeguards seemed to be, they might even let you play cards with them. Once the storm blew through and the thunder stopped, then all the patience would be rewarded. Since you and few others were the only ones at the pool, the lifeguards would be in a good mood and play games with you, and you would have their undivided attention for a few minutes (it is funny, I always wanted the older kids to pay attention to me and most of the time they would just tell me to go home (which wasn’t fair, because I could always go home, I never had the excuse that I had to wait on someone), and now that I am older, they don’t seem older anymore, and they do pay attention to me, and you know what? I still appreciate it, I guess a little left over childhood). And after the rain you could smell the clay from the tennis courts in the airand the steam rising from the parking lot, and the wet leaves and flowers from the landscaping, and your chlorine hair and musty towel. And you would dive back into the pool and shiver at the cooler temperature, but just be happy to be in the water again. This is a very happy memory for me, almost as great as it would be to have a hurricane named Charlsie.
the thin line between optimism and delusion... 