“Do you think that’s the storm?” the mildly creepy man waiting beside me at the crossing light asked. We’d already established that 1) my dog is a beagle, 2) yes, she’s young, but not as young as you’d think given how psychotically playful and jumpy she is, 3) he has two dogs, but they’re much older, and 4) dogs are often nicer than people…so I guess it was about time we got around to the weather. It’s a long freaking light.
And honestly I’m mostly guessing at his half of the conversation, since he was speaking in that soft, quick mumble that older French men have down to a tee, and that I can’t understand to safe my life. Plus, the wind was picking up.
“I don’t know,” I answered absently. “But the forecast is for rain all week, so.” We had had a rainy morning, a nice afternoon, and now the rain was starting to sprinkle down again; pretty typical for our days.
“I think it’s the storm,” he said, a little petulantly, still gazing at a part of the sky that was really only barely darker than the rest of it. And then the light changed and I waved a cheerful goodbye.
The walk from our vet’s office (Juliette was due for vaccines, although her capacity for sudden-onset Stockholm syndrome is actually more disturbing than the almost zero chance she’d ever get rabies) is about ten minutes in total. I spent the last six of those cursing one of those linguistic mix-ups that I’ve never been able to thoroughly get out of my head: I just never remember which word means “storm” and which means “hurricane.”
I felt it coming, for the record, the way you can feel summer or taste snow coming in on the air. But of course I assumed that it was just the chatty guy getting into my head, and let Juliette sniff here and there, and double back, and stop to stare at people, because I felt bad about scaring her silly and then letting some guy stab her. So I didn’t really hear the wind or feel the hairs on my arms standing up until the rain had picked up.
I tried to hurry Juliette along, but she doesn’t have the instincts God gave a turnip, and she kept plodding along and smelling the scenery. And then it hit: pelting rain, howling wind, bits of landscaping turned into debris. Naturally I was wearing the wrong shoes to run in, and naturally some kid in a hoodie came thisclose to barreling into Juliette running the other way, and naturally this was one of the times the “1″ in our door’s code box declined to work, forcing me to fish for my keys. I was soaked to the skin by the time we got inside, and Jolie came running to meet us as if our ship had gone missing at sea. It was pitch-black in the apartment, and so I turned on every light and wrapped myself in a blanket under a pile of dogs.
Fifteen minutes later it was sunny blue skies as far as the eye could see. Tell me: what is the word for that?