When it rains it really pisses down.

 

There is nothing quite like a summer storm in Queensland. The sky darkens rather quickly, sometimes turning that odd alien green colour and then there is a stillness before all hell breaks loose. Yesterday it was stinky hot, I don’t know how Steve managed to even think about golf. The humidity and heat built up and later than usual the rain came. What a blessed relief!

I say it was late yesterday because typically the storms attack just as school lets out. I have very clear memories of slopping home through the rain and the puddles and the swollen gutters. If we were lucky and that was generally early in the season there’d be a bit of slime in the gutters to help gutter surf some of the way home – no I don’t think skate boards were invented then. I remember the old woman going completely spastic about sodden shoes and lining ‘em up on the open door of the oven trying to dry ‘em out for the next day, when it would happen all over again. Oh what fun it was.

When I was teaching it was less fun. The drama spaces at schools were generally an after thought, a closed-in breeze way or a converted cupboard, and nearly always poorly ventilated and certainly no airconditioning, heaven forbid! By lunchtime everyone was fed up. Year 9 boys who had yet to discover the joys of deodorant, were so pongy that my mother would have been rejoicing over the damp shoe smell in comparision. My studios were generally carpeted and shoe free zones. It was physical hard work teaching drama and it was hot!! Those summer afternoons before the storms hit would find kids huddled, betting which stream of sweat running down my legs would hit the carpet first. Yeh it was sweat, not pee, I was younger then. On a side note spend a second imagining the smell of the studio every morning after all that sweaty carpet had had time to ferment in the evening. OOOH YUM. If a window afforded any view of the sky, kids would slowly melt over and watch the clouds race. It didn’t matter that they had seen it all before, because I reckon the cloud dance of summer storms is mesmerising. I find it so, still.

Yesterday’s downpour was a whopper, it overflowed the pool and I discovered a dead fish which I reckon might have died of shock, in the pond this morning. Poor old Dog goes nuts and hides under furniture. The wind was so fierce that it marched the BBQ across the deck. Now that had not happened before! Water blew in under the doors and big puddles formed on the floor – thankfully concrete. So no damage was done if we discount the fish, and Steve and I were in the pool not long after the storm had passed, enjoying the strangeness of swimming almost ontop of the pool deck.

Little bits of water continued to fall overnight, but that sort of wetness is just a bit irritating. Nothing beats the fury of the summer rain.