Thunder

It is January and right now it is raining hard in fits outside.  I can handle rain not being snow in January, especially with where I live in the South.  But the thunder that has rumbled a couple of times along with this storm has me feeling kind'a creeped out.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that part of the fear I'm feeling from hearing the thunder has to do with how many tornado warnings I went through last spring the last time ol' spouse-who-I-swear-is-sometimes-here was out of town.  But I know that mostly I feel weirded out because thunder isn't supposed to happen in January.  It isn't in the charts and graphs.  It isn't in the history.  It isn't in the predictable.  So if this January isn't like what other Januarys have been like, then what the heck is next January going to look like...or the next January after that...or all the January's my kids will face when I'm dead for Pete's sake?  I want them to have pleasant, normal, predictable Januarys.

I'm waiting right now to hear back from Sidekick Sister's doctor on what he thinks about some x-rays we got of a leg of hers that has a congenital defect.  He is in Japan right now and his secretary says we'll hear from him "sometime."  When I talk to spouse-in-the-phone at night these days we're usually discussing where his career might take us next.  The options feel dizzyingly wide as a Montana sky.  But how can I know when we can get a dog, whether we should buy a new or used truck, whether I should really invest in my garden, when we should plan a vacation, if we should have more babies if the major things in my life aren't set and settled and ticking along a manicured path?

Whenever I get all wound up about it all.  When my heart and brain get a little distracted by the thunder, I like to think about the lilies in the field.  They just grow.  And gosh, I think they're beautiful.  And I look back on my life up to this point and all the panic attacks I've had along the way, all the unknowns that I've twisted around, and I see that they have flowered into the satisfyingly pretty bloom of my present.  It makes me figure that even when I'm dead, January will most likely be A.O.K.