Storms by Harper Howze

Storms terrified me as a child. The teeth-rattling grumble of thunder would send me scurrying to the basement, or lead me to press my nose against the panes of glass in the living room, staring through them in the hope of identifying whether this particular storm would be the one that tore off the roof. Growing up in the leafy Washington suburbs, I needn't have worried. Nothing worse than the wispy tails of Carolina hurricanes ever troubled our little brick house, but that geographic reality did nothing to relax my hyperactive ten-year-old mind. I didn’t like uncertainty (and, if I’m honest, still don’t), and few things in my comfortable childhood presented more uncertainty than the minute possibility of being battered to pieces by the sky. But I was offered some reassurance thanks to one certainty my parents had given me: there weren’t tornadoes where we lived. I did not need to worry about those movie-famous tubes of death descending on our neighborhood, even if the thunder was loud and scary.

Well then, not even a year later, those villains pulled the rug right out from under my one happy certainty. They up and moved us to, of all places, Kansas. A state whose most notable claim to fame was when a tornado picked up Dorothy, house and all. A state that sits in the bit of the country called Tornado Alley. I was absolutely beside myself, so furious and betrayed that my first reaction to the news was to grab a NERF blaster and exercise my Second Amendment right to fire plastic darts at my dad. Now I had to live with the knowledge that every single storm could end up with us being flung into Oz, or just plain pulverized.

Our new prairie home came with plenty of helpful reminders of its tempestuous spot on the map. A tornado room in the basement, encased in heavy concrete (although concerningly lacking a door). Tornado drills at school, where crouching in the halls was supposed to help; it felt more like dust bunnies being neatly lined up for the vacuum cleaner. Monthly tests of the tornado sirens, whose eerie banshee-like wail is far more bone-chilling than the obnoxiously loud Dutch air-raid sirens. Even the local IKEA had little tornado-swept fields in its fake display windows, presumably thanks to some Swedish designer not knowing what else to do for Kansas. There was no escaping this new fact of life. Our first tornadic storm came at night, cloaked in black; we spent hours in the basement, eating Oreos and waiting. It was every bit the justification of my fears.

But the next storm came in daylight, with nothing hiding it from view. I remember standing on the street outside our driveway, looking west, and finding myself gazing upon a thing of terrible beauty. Immense clouds blanketed the sky, a shade of gray-blue of impossible depth. Lighting roiled within; first orange, then purple, then brilliant white, and before them came a rolling chorus of thunder, the very drums of Zeus. I was utterly transfixed by the unbelievable sight which seemed so incongruent with the mundanity of my suburban surroundings. It was still terrifying, but somehow that terror was no longer the unknowable evil of the night, but the exhilaration of standing atop a mountain knowing that the cliff lies next to you. “All shall love me and despair,” Galadriel declared to Frodo, and she would’ve done well to tell that to Dorothy and Toto.

Seven years living on the Great Plains changed how I saw storms. My heart still races faster when I hear thunder, but I no longer want to crawl under the nearest table: I want to stand on the porch and watch the weather rolling in, till the wall of rain turns the sky around me green and the wind cries lonesomely as it wraps around the right angles of our old wooden home. Somehow, in a complete distortion of their original role, these violent expressions of nature have become a source not of fear, but of nostalgia. Dutch storms, with their enveloping gray and casual thunder, don’t even come within an inch of their Midwestern counterparts, but they still summon a longing for home. Many a UCU friend could attest how much the sight of evening lightning glimpsed from Tower has led me to leap up and rush to stand on the balcony for an hour as the storm passes over.

Having spent perhaps too much of your time waxing poetic about weather, I’ll skip to the point. About a month ago, as I was once again on the balcony watching lightning in the distance, I started to wonder. If storms have become so startlingly wistful, what will cause such emotions when Utrecht and UCU are no longer everyday life? As I’m sure every third year would agree, these bizarre few weeks after graduation lend a lot of time to bittersweet thinking about our kind-of-finished-ish bachelors, even if we can't wait to start post-UCU life. A thousand things seem like obvious candidates, but I am certain there will be things which we could not possibly envision as nostalgic, which will nonetheless become so. Bits of our lives here will metamorphose into something whose shadow will bring with it the brief, absurd wish that these three years had gone on forever, instead of sweeping past in such a tornadic whirlwind.