This is an image for Photos.

Tea, the old-fashioned way! (Actually, I’m pretty sure they’ve had teapots for a while now, but still.)

My camera betrayed me here. I sat it down and told it very carefully: “I want this one to show how dark it is during the storm, okay?” Then it went and took a picture of a nice, bright-looking kitchen. I could have switched modes and told it very specifically what to do, but gave up after this shot. It would’ve humiliated the poor thing even more, anyway.

So we got a killer thunderstorm the other day. There were a few hours before the actual sunset when the clouds had rolled in and it just remained a static dark twilight. Soon after this fake sunset you could hear the lightning approaching, and just as the house was really starting to shake those dark gray clouds dumped a lake’s worth of water on us, all at once. The channel is only a couple hundred feet wide, but until now I hadn’t thought that it was even possible for it to rain so hard you couldn’t see across. So there I was, scrambling around the porch lining buckets up under the dripping spots (in normal rain the roof doesn’t even leak), the rain beating against the metal roof so hard it grated my eardrums and made me feel I was in some kind of rickety tropical lean-to, waiting out a mean storm somewhere in Central America. If you looked out across the channel you could see only the dull gray of that ethereal mass of water, stationary and immoveable over the roiled surface of the channel beneath. On top of all that, there was the drone of random thunder so frequent it sounded like a charging army of angry gods. As real sunset approached it quieted down some, then developed into a full-fledged storm once more after dark. Needless to say our cheap microwave and ancient little toaster oven had no power, which left me with the stove for dinner (and for tea.) I’d been putting off cranking the old thing up, but (during a relative lull) mustered the courage to go outside and turn on the gas. After waiting ten minutes or so for the propane to fill the lines, you have to lift up the entire iron stovetop to light the pilot light beneath. It doesn’t light any of the burners, as it’s supposed to (we use matches), but we have to keep it going if the gas is on or gas would leak into the house.