Dear Kitty,

By The Mind Filled on July 20, 2012 • ( 1 )

Dear Kitty,

Last night was loud and scary.

We had a line of thunderstorms move through and as is typical, I was on the covered front porch watching it approach. You probably know by now that I adore storms and am sometimes comforted by their appearance.

The wind began to howl, thunder shook the house and then lightning struck a tree in front of us.

I screamed like a girl (which makes sense because I am one, but for some reason I am slightly ashamed of the female hysterics) and I ran in the house. Shaking like a chihuahua on crack, I stood for a moment behind the glass door watching a light show that would have made Pink Floyd drool over the strobe effects. Then common sense kicked in as I watched limbs fly by reminiscent of a scene from Wizard Of Oz and I ran to grab sleeping children (how they were still sleeping is beyond me since a floor board creaking at 2 am can wake them from a sound sleep for a glass of water)

I now know that I can’t lift both the small girls, because frankly…they aren’t small anymore. I can however carry a two year old on my hip and limp drag a 60lb child to a safe location. (Dear daughter, if you ever read this one day, I’m sorry about the door frame incident. I thought it was wider than that)

I could see some of the damage through the flashes of lightning last night, but couldn’t get a clear image in the night. It looked bad and my overly abundant imagination helped me picture every tree on our 3 acres scattered around like toothpicks in a accidental pallet spill at the toothpick packaging/shipping facility. Scorch marks dotting the ground from lightning strikes playing hop scotch were probably going to make my English Gardens look more like the base of Mount Vesuvius.

God gave me a vividly, horribly beautiful imagination.

The morning light reveals that we indeed have tree damage, but nothing like what I feared and nothing like what could have been.

…and frankly…don’t most fears dissipate in the light that replaces the dark?