Tonight has been the very definition of "a dark and stormy night," exactly the kind of night the author means when the first line of the chapter is, "It was a dark and stormy night," and supernatural things are about to happen. I've been watching it from the comfort of my deck above the canal for a few hours, nursing one, then another scotch on the rocks, the cold liquid warming me. The rain coming down hard at times is loud as it hits the canal, water on water. And then, in an instant, every leaf on the tree off my deck, every ripple in the water of the canal, and every other little thing to be seen is perfectly illuminated with a cold white flash of light. Seconds later the clap of thunder; it would be loud by itself but now it echoes through the man made canyons of cement and steel and glass that make up the city. My old cat, Danger, does not like any of this, not one bit, and he hides inside the apartment under the seldom used dining table when the lightning flashes and the thunder rumbles.
Now we know, scientifically, the lightning is produced when two fronts, one warm, the other cold, move against one another high in the atmosphere, but, being of Swedish ancestry, I like to imagine myself in the pagan past when the things we knew to be true were much different from what we know to be true now, when the thunder and lightning were caused by Thor's great chariot being pulled across the sky by his goats, Tanngrisnir (teeth barer) and Tanngnjóstr (teeth gnasher), and the illuminated towering clouds of the night sky barely concealed Odin and his Wild Hunt. Seeing such a sight was a fearful thing as it could presage the observers death! Or your soul could be pulled from your body and go to join the host of the dead on their hunt over the horizon.
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