Even the hard, drawn-up clay of North Carolina's Piedmont seemed to welcome the rain that finally fell last evening, but the best part was the lightning and thunder.

The fruit and vegetable farmers – and those of use that consume their produce – have enjoyed the sweet richness created by the drought and heat we have been experiencing.

Melons, cantaloupes and berries have been especially good this year because it has been exceptionally hot and dry. Just ask any farmer about this phenomena.

However, the sweet fruit is best enjoyed in a nice, air-conditioned room. Out-of-doors has been just too unpleasant.

Mosquitoes don't like my blood, but those that are afflicted by the little critters say that they are bad this year – another good reason to enjoy the in-of-airconditioned-doors.

The lightning and thunder was most intense when I was a young-un in the Virginia mountains. We had many different minerals in the ground there and there are huge deposits of low-grade iron ore. I could list the other things that were present in the ground, but I don't want you to get bored and fall asleep and bang your head on your keyboard. 
The impression of the keys on your forehead would be hard to explain to Nurse Johnson in the General Hospital emergency room, which, interestingly, is not located on the ground floor.

I wonder how the ambulances back up to the 9th floor elevator ... 
Back to the lightning and thunder in the mountains. The iron ore is attractive to the lightning looking for a ground. Charged clouds sending out their fingers sometimes will hit a pocket of ore and the grand connection is made. More than ripples of thunder, this causes shakes and quakes in the ground.

When such an event would strike close to home, we'd go out to look for the strike point.

If we found it, the prizes were globules of iron. Probably the iron first discovered and put to use by early humans.

Lightning, thunder and iron. Manly stuff.

If you want to see something very pretty, you just have to visit The Cascades Falls near Pearisburg, Virginia. Just type this into your search bar in Google Earth or Yahoo Maps. The Cascades are near Mountain Lake, a spot where a bit of the movie Dirty Dancing was filmed.

When taking the twins there so that they could tell everyone they had been to this pretty place where God had spent some extra time making the place beautiful. By the time we had gotten to within about a quarter mile from the falls, a swift and sudden storm unleashed its fury on us and we ran away from the dangerous lightning and toward the safety of our vehicle.

We got back, safe, but soaked.

On the way back though town I thought it would be a good idea to bring dinner home so we did an odd thing for me and pulled into a fast food drive-through.

I must tell you that it had only rained at the top of the Cascades and not in the little town.

Needless to say, when I paid for the order with soaked paper money, the lady studied me very thoroughly. She looked at the mildly dried clothes of the girls and all I could think to say was that they had just demanded to be baptized and that we were off to have a post baptismal dinner.

It was really the hot food, bath and dry clothes that were going to feel so good.

Then, the nap that followed would not be disturbed by a direct strike by lightning or the biggest echoing boomer the mountains could create.

I know that God's Voice was sometimes in that thunder and was stronger and clearer than that of Charlton Heston.

The Voice is still there and maybe there is something that we can all hear the next time the Thunder rolls.

“Did you back up your files Tim?” “Is the UPS software working and is the battery in the APC up to its task?” “Shouldn't you unplug all of the electronics this time?” 

“Weren't the best storms experienced in the tree house?” 

© tim www.timjohnsonphoto.com