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Moving to the Washington, DC area to start grad school had me arriving with my dad from a cross country drive from San Francisco that took 4 days and arriving in mid-August. We parked the car at my apartment complex and unloaded and went into Georgetown to get something to eat. My dad suggested Houston’s (now gone) and my dad was a foodie and knew places with all types of good food most everywhere, so a suggestion was rarely not taken as a must do meal. As we were walking down the block toward Houston’s, the dark sky became an utter torrential downpour. Raindrops the size of small watermelons (okay, that is what they seemed like, but may have been more like grapes given the surprise of such a storm where it was sunny 15 minutes prior) soaked us and the streets filled with water rushing down toward the Potomac.

That was my introduction to August summer storms in DC. It was also my introduction to take your breath away humidity. In the many dog years since arriving I’ve grown accustom to both the storms and humidity. I now (don’t repeat this) rather like both of them now.

This afternoon as the skies darkened and the litter of warning notifications for a hazardous storm popped up on all the digital screens that are within an eye’s blink of us now. I opened the balcony door and mixed the abundantly chilly air conditioned inside environment mix with the robustly damp and hot air outside as I peered to the dark quickly moving and growing clouded skies. A quick white flash beyond the corner of a building and a low rumble of approaching thunder built the anticipation of a good romping storm.

Soon the wind would pick-up and you could hear the mutter of “we’re not in Kansas anymore”, not that we ever were. No witches would fly by, but leaves, small plastic bags void of the Gatorade or sandwich it may have held at some point is now making fun of gravity was it floats, twists, and collapses and fills moving up 40 to 80 feet in the air. Soon a flash of lightening blitzes from nowhere and the storm is officially on. The winds increase more and the large raindrops hit anything in their way hard and splash on what was perfectly dry a nanosecond before. In fractions of moments everything is soaked and the lightening and thunder are nearly simultaneous.

The ambient air temperature has dropped. In ten minutes the air is not only much cooler, but the humidity feels less like a warm hug from a sweaty large monster with slobbery skin and more like a puppy’s tummy. In about 10 more minutes the sun is peeking through and the necks of people are turning to find the rainbow and take in the blue sky before the sun fades from day to night.

How could somebody not deeply appreciate this?