ANOTHER STORM IS COMING (PART 1)
(Photo by Shashank Sahay)
Another storm is coming.
They say this one will be worse than the one over the weekend when the rain fell hard, and the rivers flooded, and the windows rattled and bent with the wind, and the lights flickered every few minutes as if to remind us not to get too comfortable.
My son, Alex, is what they call neuro-divergent with a special sensitivity to sound. He’s now scared of the rain, specifically the heavy pitter-patter on our windows and rooftop - as though small rocks are being thrown at us. I’ve always considered the sound of rain relaxing, sometimes spiritual, as one’s helplessness to nature quickly becomes apparent. And we — for our own good, perhaps — have no choice but to surrender our egos to the merciless crack and boom of gods warring outside and hold our loved ones tight until the battle is over.
Maybe this fear is something Alex can grow out of, but it’s difficult to tell with his condition. Everyone is different, the doctors had mentioned, which I started noticing after he turned two-years old. He couldn’t speak like the other kids. He couldn’t understand what I was saying. Even today, he didn’t grasp my meaning when I told him the storm was nothing to fear, and that I would protect him.
This next storm might last for two days, they say. We’ll probably lose power. Our windows might shatter. But my wife, Mandi, and I have a plan. I will draw the blinds for every window, and she will charge our electric devices so that, once the storm hits and the power blows, we’ll remain safe on the couch, fixated on our iPads and cellphones until bedtime. As for Alex’s sound sensitivity, we will smother his ears with Mandi’s gargantuan headphones, so he’ll only be able to hear his cartoons. It’d be nice to run the fireplace, really set the mood. But during the last storm, the flames surged violently as the power flickered. I don’t understand the mechanism behind it, but it’s a gas fire place, and I don’t want to take any chances.
The darkness was never really a problem though, not for Mandi or I anyway. On nights with fair weather, we sometimes forget to turn on the living room light and sit in darkness, oblivious, watching television and talking as though nothing is out of the ordinary. Even Alex doesn’t seem that shaken by darkness. That is, unless he glances down the hall and sees the floating, green eyes of our cat, Mystery, staring out at him. When that happens, he runs away around the far end of the couch and leaps into my arms. Haha. It makes me happy to give him a sense of security. But really, I don’t want him to be afraid. Not of the small stuff anyway. If I can only get through to him… maybe one day he won’t need me for protection. He’ll be ready for the storm all on his own.
