Thunder

 

Carolyn J. Rose

A long rumble of thunder woke me shortly before dawn. Close. And low.

 

Rain hit the roof. A spatter. A splatter. A deluge. Then, a splatter once again. 

I listened for a time, remembering thunderstorms in the Catskill Mountains where I grew up. Cracks and booms and echoes bouncing off mountainsides. Overlapping. Crashing back on themselves.

 Streaks of lightning. Sheets of rain. Dirt roads awash. The brook below the house running high. The stream in the narrow valley between ridges a rusty red with clay washed from its banks.

 The sound of thunder there and then always evoked images of Rip Van Winkle. And images of the ghosts of Henry Hudson's crew, bowling somewhere out of my sight behind the clouds.

 As a child I would speculate about how large their bowling balls and pins would have to be to produce such impressive sounds. I may have asked the adults in my world about that. I may have gotten some kind of answers. I may even have thought the answers had merit because I believed in ghosts. Or at least the possibility of ghosts. 

I still do.

So as this morning's spatters ceased and the storm rolled away, I wondered if those ghosts regularly left the Catskills to bowl among other mountains. I wondered who reset the pins and who kept the score sheet and whether, like the rest of us, ghosts were required to wear special shoes.

 

But before I got to wondering about monogrammed bowling balls and bags, I fell asleep once more.