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06/02/08 |
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Summers when I was a KidYou often hear people say things like ‘When I was a kid, the sun was shining all day long, all summer long. It was hot and sunny all the time and we went swimming every day.’ ‘At least, that’s how I remember it.’ I suppose you do have exaggerated memories like that when you grow up in a place where there is sometimes absolutely perfect weather. Funny thing, no one I grew up with ever says things like that. Maybe because we had perfect weather about once every 10 years. For one day. Other than that one day we had 2 kinds of weather: too damn hot and too damn cold. The summers were hot, humid, and miserable. But we did have one thing: great storms! So when we talk about the great weather of our childhood, we don’t talk about gorgeous sunny days, we talk about storms. And just like with people who thought the sun always shone when they were kids, my husband thinks I definitely exaggerate about our storms. There was the one that almost turned into a tornado when I was 6 or 7. We were already going down into the basement when we looked outside and there was the paper boy, coming to deliver our newspaper. He could barely walk because the wind was blowing so hard. My mom opened the door and screamed, ‘Get in here!’ He ran into our house and we all went straight down to the basement. That was only a year after a neighboring town was completely flattened by a tornado so we took it seriously. There was the the storm that came when we were at the beach one day and the thunder knocked my cousin off a wall. He was walking along this little wall and the thunder was just so loud that he fell off. I sometimes have a hard time believing this story, even though I was there and saw the whole thing. I remember several storms that almost turned into tornados and sent us down into the basement, sometime in the middle of the night. Later on as we got older we decided going to the basement was not cool (this shows you the powerful stupidity of teenagers), so we went outside and stood on the porch instead. At the very worst point, when a tornado is definitely coming straight into town, the firemen get into their trucks and drive around town with loudspeakers, telling people to get inside. At that point we would still be on the porch watching the whole thing. The sad thing was that no tornado ever did come through town while I was there. They either just stayed as storms or the tornados hit somewhere outside of town. One finally came through in 1982, but I was in Finland then so didn’t get to see it. I’ve seen exactly one thing I’d call a storm since I moved to Finland 16 years ago. There were lots of things Finns were calling storms. But to me, if no roofs are flying off houses, then it’s not a real storm. That one storm was about 3 years ago and you might remember it. My brother-in-law Ilkka and I were at the summer cottage with our kids. You could see the storm come at us across the lake, and when it hit, we sent all the kids inside. But I guess I’m used to my old bad habit, because he and I stood outside on the porch and watched it.
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