Cocooning during this Kansas storm season, I try to avoid the cataclysm outside my window

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4 days ago

The spring storm season has brought frequent rain and thoughts of self-preservation, writes opinion editor Clay Wirestone. (Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
Each day now in Lawrence, where my family and I live, I watch the clouds roll in and the rains come.
The spring storm season thunders and flashes and pours, and the lawns flourish and gutters overflow. I sit here in my home office through the evenings and watch as the lightning casts strange shadows. I hear the rain pelting the roof. Later on, when I take our dog out for a walk, the rains have usually slowed and the neighborhood smells earthy and damp, while the doused roads shine under streetlamps.
During these days, my son hangs around the house. School has ended, and summer activities remain a few weeks distant. He plays video games and dotes on the pets. My husband's work has shifted into its busiest season, so some days I only see him toward the end of the day.
I seem to live now, for a week or two at least, in a small protected bubble. The rains come and the world rumbles and my son and I stay indoors and wait for the storm to pass. Aren't many of us doing that right now, staying in those kind of bubbles, waiting for the skies to clear? We can create those bubbles in different ways. Some of us watch seasons of old situation comedies, following the adventures of Sam and Diane and Cliff and Norm on Cheers (rest in peace, George Wendt). Some of us watch horror movies (I enjoyed Nicholas Roeg's 'Don't Look Now' the other night). Some of us find escape through exercise or alcohol or other activities that change our brain and body chemistry.
It is the season of survival.
We endure the weather. It's different for all of us. Here in Kansas, the weather might be a private prison company pressing to reopen facilities to serve Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. It might be a law that denies critical yet misunderstood health care to teenagers. It might be your immigration status if you study at a university. It might be an uncertain economic climate that threatens small business in towns and cities.
In uncertain times, we search for comparisons. We judge today's storm against the storms of the past. We survived those, we tell ourselves, so surely we must survive these ones. Those storms may have even been worse, we tell ourselves. We should expect spring rains, Discover Magazine explains, as humid summer air collides with dry winter air. The mixture forms clouds, yields precipitation.
We still wait indoors, swaddled in decades-old quilts and drinking hot tea.
The metaphor strains. My correspondents will write me email messages insisting that determined Kansans can weatherproof their homes. We can work together to find community and purpose during these dreary, overcast days. We need not — must not — hide from the work ahead of us.
I understand these things, agree with them, have written them before. We can both endure and act. The stormy season will pass. These times will end. The clouds will clear and the sun will nudge itself above the horizon, and we will pick up the pieces. I will mow the lawn and pick up the random branches that fell from the giant tree in our front yard. Cleanup awaits, and it will take the whole subdivision pitching in.
Yet while spring storm season continues, at least let me have these gloomy evenings. Let me embrace poetry and fiction and imagination leaps. Grant me the time to recharge, to dote on my family, to enjoy distractions for a handful of days. We all deserve time to center ourselves, to feel protected from the inevitable deluge.
These moments of grace will steel us for a long, hot summer.
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.