Desert Storm

I'm nine years old playing hopscotch with with my neighbor. Lines of chalk creep from the front porch over uneven plateaus of concrete mapping a trail with no real destination. Summer has arrived and with it comes a hot dry air that is more suffocating than sustaining. The heat shoos the adults inside, and we laugh at their folly as they pass up an irreclaimable summer day. For us the antidote to the heat is as simple as a popsicle or a run through the hose. So we tirelessly stamp our feet all over the concrete, when suddenly we detect a change. Maybe it is a sixth sense that comes with being a desert kid, for this is long before we worried about the morning news and the 5-day forecast, but suddenly we know its about to rain. The air thickens and tenses in our lungs as we hold our breath for the gift that is about to come. Yet despite our anticipation, the storm still manages to catch us by surprise. In seconds the world around us is transformed. The sun departs its roost to course through our veins as we accept the weight of the entire sky falling upon us. We laugh and scream in delight, but every word that leaves us is an orphan lost to the sounds of water exploding. This is before the thunder and lightning crash the party. It is long before the rain stops falling. Before it leaves us with a smell almost as enlivening as the downpour itself, like a lovers smell lingering on the sheets. It is long before we know about that kind of love. And in that moment we feel something we don't have the word to describe, that only now we realize is something called bliss. And we fail to notice the sweet swirl of color as our chalk is swept away.