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Summer storm

THE POSTSCRIPT, Carrie Classon

I was headed out for my daily hike. There was thunder in the distance. 

“It’s getting lighter,” my husband, Peter, said. “I don’t think we’re going to get any rain.”

The air smelled like a storm to me, but what do I know? If my dog, Milo, were still alive I would have asked him. Milo would huddle in the corner of the kitchen when a thunderstorm approached. 

“There’s no storm on the radar,” Peter would tell him. Milo didn’t care what the radar said. We called him, “Doppler Dog,” because if Milo was in the corner, bad weather was never far behind. But Milo is no longer with us and I was headed out on a hike. 

“Do you think I need a hat?” I asked. If the sun came out, I’d want a hat. 

“I don’t think you’ll need it,” Peter assured me. 

It might be worth noting that both Peter and I grew up on the plains of the Midwest where you can see a storm coming from miles away and the weather is predicted accurately to within the quarter of an hour. We live in the mountains now and things are different. 

I left the house without a hat and it started to rain before I’d even made it to the trail. That might have been a good time to turn around. I didn’t.

I go on my hike almost every day. I hike in the snow and the drizzle and the cold. 

“There is no bad weather,” a naturalist in Alaska once told me, “only inappropriate clothing choices.” I like that.

So, when it started to rain, I wished I had my hat. But the weather was warm and, as Peter pointed out, it was getting lighter up ahead. Unfortunately, that’s not where the weather was coming from. 

By the time I got to the trail, the rain was steady but it wasn’t cold. I started walking faster.