I watch it rain outside my window, and ponder, per my usual rainy-day arsenal of tricks to stay entertained. I have exhausted my DVD player; technology must hate me on these days. An Easter weekend of solid rain, and several movies later... I am still here, maintaining the "fort." I am the unofficial sentry for my house when the 'rents are gone (for any given amount of time, too). Since the older sister lives on the East Coast next to a pretty Atlantic Ocean, I have the "second-in-command" position. It's not bad--just unexpected still, at times.
The rain does not pound the roof, nor the sides of my house, yet it is painful to the ear, like an infection of the sinuses that I cannot flush out with saline solution. It invades my head; my thoughts are tampered by it, and I choose to let that be such. It's not like I don't notice it, it's more like I consider it a part of me after awhile. It's crawled in on its proverbial hands and knees, grabbed a blanket from the closet, prepared a cup of nuclear liquid, and curled up on my couch. And I don't mind it there. Not at all.
It's made itself at home in my head. On a sunny day, it will recur its' memories, and I will be instantly transported to it's environment again.
And it does not bother me one bit. Of course, I now ask why I am bothering to notice in the first place? I like it all curled up on my sofa, clutching molten cocoa beans. It is a good friend of mine, and is always welcome to stay.
Like I said, it continues to rain here in the land of the rain-deprived, and I found the irony in my previous statements: the mere fact of it raining entertains me. Why am I writing this anyway? It's not like I want the rain to leave... go ahead, make yourself at home. I'll be happy to play a movie for you, if you so desire. I have to play sentry anyway, I might as well have some background noise while I do so...

Dark skies churned and twisted with anger and resentment towards my family's country house in the valley surrounded by alfalfa fields in Comanche County, Kansas. I'm a country kid at heart; I relocated to the city with my family to aid an ailing grandmother 6 years ago. Garden City is my hometown, but rural Kansas land is my home.
At four years old, you are a pretty impressionable being. I believed that every cowboy in the old West carried a sixgun, and that dark clouds were scary, and should be avoided. Was I wrong or what?
To this day I wish for a large supercellular storm to form and shape back in that area of nowhere, for the roads may be impassible and turn your wheel-wells into the makings of adobe pottery, but the scenes are breathtaking, and alter your state of mind forever. That is obviously why I'm so crazy during the month of May
At four years old, I saw my first true-to-life tornado; it twisted and bent around itself numerous times, reacting with the mother-storm above it. A slender rope touched--no, kissed--the valley wall to the west, played chicken with a shelterbelt, and slank away towards the southwest. That image has stamped itself into my mind, and refuses to leave, to die. It still flares with the same intensity as the day it burned my brain.
I do not live for tornadoes--on the contrary! I live with tornadoes, as a part of my everyday life. They will not die in me, no matter how hard I have tried to rid myself of them. The addiction is as strong as ever, so friend or foe beware: dark clouds trigger the insanity chemical in me, and it is a very powerful imbalance, just as the turbulent atmosphere that causes it.
Insane May, here we come...