Boom

I had something to keep me company last night when I was up nursing Imogen at 3am. A huge thunderstorm! I'm talking a real-life, honest-to-goodness thunderstorm with lightening that illuminates the entire room right through the curtains and thunder that shakes the windowpanes. The kind of thunderstorm that is one of the things I really miss about Colorado in July. I love thunderstorms. Even better, Elliot slept right through it, and Imogen happily nursed right back to sleep.

The storm made me remember a poem I wrote years ago about missing those bone-rattling Colorado thunderstorms. Here it is, in honor of Portland's noble attempt to match those storms last night.

Denver’s Rain

The gutter in front of our house on Glencoe Street
had a section wide and deep as the bowl
of a pelvis, rimmed with asphalt that softened
with the heat, fingered into the cracks
of the concrete, steamed and hissed
when the rains began. Late summer
afternoons in Denver meant thunderstorms,
the sky opening up and the full gong
of the storm resounding in my five-year old body.

Severe Thunderstorm Watch — it was still safe
to be playing outside with my sister, the hose
spreading sheets of water down the driveway
and into the Big Gutter. My mother was still
snapping beans on the front porch, silver
mixing bowls at her browned bare feet. We
could hear the wind leaning into the crabapple tree
in the backyard with its moist breath
of thunder, the tree rocking in and out
of the dark sky and dropping its red fruit.

Severe Thunderstorm Warning — we had to pull
everything in — shut off the hose as the sky,
cracking, let the first drops fall. We gathered
up our cats as our mother collected her beans
and moved us into the house. The small
TV brightened before us and we watched the weathermen
on Storm Center 4 point out tornadoes, fascinated, secretly
hoping one would head for our house.

My mother tried to keep us away from the windows,
but we wanted to watch the lightening, count
the storm’s movement towards us in the seconds
between the split and the sky rolling itself
whole again — wanted to watch the Big Gutter
fill until it spilled onto the sidewalk, the water
rushing around the block like our dog
when he got loose, hail the size of ping pong balls
casting the lawn into winter. And we sat
in the dark of the house, the crabapple tree
losing leaves a season too soon, thinking
of the possibilities of mud and blueing skies,
the gutter now indistinguishable from the body of the storm.

Brittney Corrigan, copyright 1991. All rights reserved.

In other news, Imogen had her 9-month doctor's appointment today. She's 15lbs, 10oz. The doctor was a little concerned that she hasn't gained much weight since last time, but she's pudgy and healthy, so everything is probably fine (she's going back for a weigh-in at the end of August). I'm not concerned, since I was a little baby, Thomas and I are both small folks (elfin, as our friend Urban likes to remark), and Elliot and Imogen were both small at birth. Here are all 2 feet 3 inches of her.

She also got the last round of her Pc and HIB shots, and now she's passed out in the backpack. No more shots for awhile now, whew! For those of you interested, we've been doing an alternative vaccination schedule. We started the shots late and spread them out, and she's only received DTaP, HIB, and Pc. We're putting off Polio, Hep A, and MMR for when she's older, and we won't be doing Hep B and Chickenpox (the latter we'll give her later if she doesn't get them naturally). For you parents out there interested in learning more about vaccines and alternate schedules, I most highly recommend The Vaccine Book by Dr. Robert Sears. It's the only truly objective book I've ever seen on the subject of vaccines.

And not to be left out, here's Elliot maxin' and relaxin' on the arm of Papa's new recliner. Ah, summer.

I hope everyone has a fun and safe 4th of July holiday. We'll see if the fireworks display can rival that thunderstorm!