Tensions billowed and swelled like anvil clouds before big thunderstorms, fraught with electricity and loaded with pent up violence. It wasn’t so much fear of impending harm that caused these stresses, it was pressure—actual, physical polarities, charges shifting and taking sides, clusters of ions swarming in the heat, all lined up and ready to bolt.
When the storms rolled in and began dumping their rage, those invisible, bound up tensions exploded in peals of lightning, tumbling downward in bits and pieces, immense, charged raindrops and whirling winds, magically releasing whatever pregnant blessing or fickle malevolence they had been hoarding.
Once one of these storms had rumbled across a swath of Delta landscape everything behind it felt new again, peaceful and unstrained. No one could quite remember what possibly they had been so upset about just minutes before.
Despite their deafening voices and destructive power, summer storms were seen by many as blessings, violent tumults that gave birth to surprising calm.
