After a long stretch of crazy-making days in which the temperature topped 100 degrees and the humidity hovered somewhere around “Sahara,” the skies finally started taking pity on us poor Salt Lakers earlier this week. It’s rained on four successive evenings, but the first three nights saw only tentative overtures to last night’s symphony. Some areas — like The Girlfriend’s apartment complex — got pummelled by hurricance-style thundershowers and hail, but here at the Bennion Compound, it was simply a good, steady downpour, exactly the sort of cleansing, nourishing rain I’ve been craving for ages. It was accompanied by a constant spectacle of lightning that would’ve made Nicola Tesla squeal with delight, and roars of thunder that were loud enough to feel in your belly. I love storms like that…

When I was a kid, my dad used to roust me out of bed in the middle of the night to come sit on the front porch and watch them with him. Dad and I have always had trouble finding common ground — I was a studious bookworm while he worked with his hands and had little inclination toward flights of fancy — but we’ve always shared a love of the summer “monsoons,” the big storms that roll across the state around the beginning of August. I never feared lightning and thunder the way many kids do, because my dad taught me that they were all part of the show.

He and mom are out of town this weekend, off in Nevada somewhere at one of their gatherings of antique car enthusiasts. As I sat on my front porch last night, watching the rain come down and sipping scotch whiskey, feeling the accumulated tension of several weeks flowing out of my shoulders and neck as smoothly as the water swelling in the gutter out front, I missed him.