Differences

It was a little after nine at night when the thunder and lightning interrupted my concentration, and the television program I was watching became second best as the rain pounded against the roof of my house. After I went to sleep a second storm woke me up. The thunder sounded like a giant fist pounding against the wall of my house, and the lightning made my bedroom glow in the dark, and the rain drops made a flood in my yard. That’s when my thinking started to make a lot of racket. I thought about the difference between watches and warnings, and thunderstorms that woke people up in the middle of the night, and flash floods that killed people’s houses, and tornadoes that blew away towns, and the hurricanes that melted the beaches, and snow storms that closed all the roads; and realized that Mother Nature was in charge of the climate but the meteorologists were in charge of what we dream about right before the weather wakes us up in the middle of the night.