by Albert Bierstadt
A — Cap of Lead across the sky
Was tight and surly drawn
We could not find the mighty Face
The Figure was Withdrawn —
A Chill came up as from a shaft
Our noon became a well
A Thunder storm combines the charms
Of Winter and of Hell
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #1735)
Beautiful photo to compliment a great poem.
Thank you, Julie! I love the way Emily describes things.
I’m not totally sure I’d agree with Emily on this one, particularly if you’ve had a long dry spell and need the rain. Still, I can see where she’s coming from. Nobody likes being shaken out of bed by lightning and thunder!
It’s been raining and thundering a lot for the past week or so — I’m losing track of time. We were in a moderate drought but on one day we got 3 inches of rain. We got slowed down by some street flooding on Monday. I don’t mind thunder if it’s rumbling around in the distance but when it’s right overhead it’s pretty unsettling!
Your photo is what it must have looked like out on Padre Island today which had 13” and here by the bay we had 3.5”. Not any thunder or lightening or wind really, but tons of steady rain!
Actually, the picture is a painting! We’ve been having a lot of rain, too, and lower temperatures, but it’s still uncomfortably humid. I won’t be sorry to see the end of this summer.
Oh, this is a lovely painting that looks so realistic that I thought it was a photo!
I hear you on suffering with summer humidity. And yes, a week of rain brought us lower temperatures too. But we were still stuck inside most of the daylight hours. Perhaps I am learning a bit about the feeling of cabin fever. 🤪
As you can probably tell from the paintings I select I do prefer objective realism in art! I am making good use of my time stuck inside here and have decided that to call myself the curator of our family’s collection of pictures, letters, journals and important papers. Seems like I find something new every day.
I like the moody photo, it matches the poem nicely.
Thank you, Tracy. It was fun finding a painting to match the poem.
This Bierstadt picture captures the sentiments of Emily Dickinson to a “T” … especially the last line.
That line caught my eye, too. I pictured heat lightning in the distance approaching with a blast of chilled air.
That lightning is scary. My grandmother witnessed a neighbor get killed by a lightning bolt and she was terrified of storms the rest of her days. I am getting that way too – this heat and humidity is not healthy – a morning “real feel” of 83 at 8:00 a.m.! But I don’t have to tell you that as you are dealing with the heat and humidity and for more months than I do.
Tim’s great-grandfather’s big brother was killed by a lightning bolt, although nobody saw it happen. This is what he wrote in his autobiography:
One of my most vivid recollections of this period is the death by a stroke of lightning on July 20th, 1870, of my only brother, Elmer Alonzo. He was my father’s first born, and had grown up into a strong, lusty farmer. He and father were more like brothers than like father and son. He was very fond of his little brother, and used to romp with me and at times good naturedly teased me. To me, there was no one in the world like Elmer. After dinner, on the day of his death, as he was starting for the hay field, I begged him to take me with him, but, as a thunder storm was looming in the west, he told me I couldn’t go. He went alone to the hay field, cocked hay until the storm came up, and a bolt of lightning ended his activities forever. His body was not discovered until the next forenoon, all covered with hay. His untimely death was a terrible blow to the entire family.
That’s really terrible and imagine how the younger brother felt as he could have met the same fate had he accompanied Elmer. You should write a post about this incident Barbara. I have always intended to write about my grandmother’s fear of storms on one of my “Grandparents Day” posts, but usually I write more lighthearted posts about her, but there have been some dark sides as well.
I did include the story in a post back in 2017, which also included a newspaper article about his death. Elmer was 28 when he died, but the reporter guessed he was about 21 years old. I might be posting more biographical sketches as time goes on. I’m still finding newspaper clippings and pictures in all those boxes I’m going through this summer….
https://www.ingebrita.net/2017/05/the-farm-on-keller-hill/
Thank you for this link Barbara. It was before we started following one another. How tragic for Elmer that he was holding onto the metal implement which acted as a conductor for that electrical current that killed him. I do not know specific details on what my grandmother witnessed about their neighbor except seeing him crumple to the ground, but she was very shaken for every bad storm. Also in your earlier post, how tragic, the mother of the three-week-old infant that had a fainting spell while having tea and passed away.
You should do more of the biographical sketches – they are interesting. I have some photos of the farm and the house where my grandmother grew up from my mom’s photo album. They are already scanned in. I had something lighter planned for this year, but it is an evergreen story and will keep. Given all our volatile weather pattern this year, I might switch. We are still slated for a stormy evening today and through tomorrow. They have backed off the tornado prediction, but the torrential rain (1-2 inches) and hail are still a possibility.
I can only imagine how witnessing someone getting struck by lightning would affect how one experienced thunderstorms thereafter. My grandmother’s house burned down when she was a teenager and for the rest of her life she couldn’t sleep at night. That story about Tim’s 2nd-great-grandmother Eliza’s death was so sad. She was 47 years old and her baby was was Tim’s great-grandfather Charles Amos, so he didn’t know his mother and wrote nothing about her in his autobiography. She had already lost two daughters, one six years old and the other four months old. Wish I knew more about her. I’m hoping to do more biographical sketches when I finish going through these boxes and getting the material organized. I will enjoy seeing the pictures of your grandmother’s farm and house (in Canada?) when you do include them in a post.
I can understand that. My mother always had a fear of fire. She wore special orthopedic shoes and could not walk without them. So if a fire broke out suddenly, taking the time to put on those shoes, lace them up and be on her way, albeit slowly as she had mobility issues especially when she got older, was something that preyed on her mind.
We had a fire at our house in Canada the year before we moved here. There was a widespread blackout that happened in November 1965 and it caused a power outage in parts of Canada and the U.S. That evening, with the neighborhood in pitch darkness, some teenagers playing pranks were going up and knocking on people’s doors … harmless pranks really and you sure wouldn’t do that now as everyone has a Ring doorbell device, but my father, with his perpetual temper, saw the kids, went out and argued with them and threatened them. Stupid, stupid man. A few weeks later, in December, someone jimmied open the front storm door and threw a Molotov cocktail in between the front door and screen door. My mother was a light sleeper and heard the storm door open, woke my father up, then heard a bang. There was a wreath on the front door, which quickly caught fire and the front door was wood so it was burning as well. The fire department was called and the fire was extinguished pretty quickly. I slept through the whole ordeal (how I don’t know). That was December 1965 and we moved here the following July. My father’s anger and argumentative nature could have gotten us killed if not for my mother haring the door.
That’s too bad that Eliza had already lost two daughters, then has an infant boy and lost her own life three weeks later.
Yes, I will have some pictures of the farmhouse and my great grandparents whom I don’t know as she passed away before I was born and I was very young when he passed away. They lived in Ariss, Ontario which is near Guelph.
I do think I will do that post instead of what I had planned … it’s been a volatile Summer and unbelievably, all weather stations predicted severe weather yesterday which never happened although some counties had three inches of rain and flooding issues – we did not get a drop here. I am grateful for no bad weather as originally tornadic activity was forecast, but I still had considerable angst worrying about it.
I can sympathize with your mother’s worry about not being able to move fast enough in case of a fire. When my father became bedridden I would worry every time there was a tornado warning as there was no way to move him down to the basement.
What I remember of that northeast blackout of 1965 was that my Ukrainian grandfather, who lived with us, died two days beforehand and relatives were coming to town for the funeral and my parents were already distressed with funeral planning. I was 8 years old. That’s very unfortunate your father was so angry and confrontational. His reactions added fuel to the fire both figuratively and literally. What a scary thing for you and your mom to live through.
Looking forward to your post about your Canadian great-grandparents and their farm! We’ve had so much rain here in recent weeks that we are out of the moderate drought we got into in June. Now the weather people on TV are talking about a tropical storm that might be coming mid-week, unless it goes out to sea. Never a dull moment with the weather.
I thought you might recall the blackout Barbara. When we had the grid outage in August 2003, I remember the news media bringing up that northeast blackout due to the similarities. Yes, I worried about tornadoes and bad storms with my mom, even before she confined herself to bed due to pain from sciatica and cellulitis flare-ups in her lower legs. She would not have gone to the basement. One time we had a severe thunderstorm and she told me to go into the basement and take Sugar (our canary) with me. I couldn’t do that Barbara.
My father was argumentative about everything and that time could have proved deadly for us.
I’ve been hearing about that tropical storm and wondering when it might get here. We have storms again Monday and Tuesday, then mercifully we have less humidity and temps in the 70s. When I got up this morning at 5:30 a.m. it was already 70 and it got to 90 this afternoon.
I wouldn’t have been able to leave my father upstairs either. In some ways eldercare was so much more difficult and emotionally draining than caring for my children. Looks like tropical storm Debby will make its way here. We were here in NC staying with Larisa when Hurricane Michael (which was a tropical storm when it got here) came through in October 2018, while Larisa was pregnant with Finn. So this won’t be our first North Carolina tropical storm. Debby should be hitting Nate & Shea in Georgia later today.
Yes, it is … I don’t like to remember those days as they were tough for both of us and I am sure it was just the same for you. I thought of you today when they gave a timeline for Debby and mentioned the Carolinas and Georgia. Hopefully your heat, humidity and volatile storms will stabilize for a while. I am looking forward to our five-day stint in the 70s. The weatherman said “you might need a coat.” He must be cold-blooded. 🙂