Dogs, but no cats –

So okay.

Someone explain to me why this happens –

I’m doing the treadmill thing (did you know that exercise seems to be part of the prevention of dementia? Now what was I talking about?) watching as The News trots out hours and hours of water – first splashing then kind of gushing – coming over those storm walls in New Orleans. It’s after ten in the morning, but I’m getting a slow start and the house is dark enough, it seems more like six thirty in the morning—tropical storm moisture meets our northern cool air stream. And our air feels as wet as what I’m seeing on screen. Plus, our trees are blowing around in the dark out there like crazy.

I finish with the treadmill, and I have to see to the horses. They have a good barn. Metal, but good. I know they’ve had a colder than should be night, and they’ve got to eat. So before my breakfast, I gather keys, sunglasses (sunglasses??) and cell phone and I open the front door. Way dark out there. But not that cold. And not really that rainy. Yeah, I’m standing there in a T-shirt and exercise pants, but it really didn’t seem that bad. It was 100 degrees two days ago, for heck’s sake.

But I grab the old LLBean nor-easter rain coat hanging by the door just in case. And the second I step out the door, a new front roars in. I get to the car, and the rain starts pelting me. By the time I get to Center St. heading west, people are fleeing eastward from the lake like refugees, some pulling boats, everybody with their headlights smeared by the wind driven rain. For a second, the mist rising from the road took me right back to that microburst two years ago, and I had to fight down a moment of panic.

I decide not to climb the driveway gate and walk in, my usual MO in the summer. Get out of the car, fighting the wind, unlock the gate and have to swing it in hard against one of the pasture gates that had come open against it. Getting plastered from behind, soaked – thank you hood on that coat. Drive in down the long driveway, back in hard next to the barn door. Rain is turning to stinging hail. Wrestle the tall barn door open, then mash it closed. Enter the barn, and total cacophony. Hail against a steel roof. Amazing. Pounding, ringing, roaring. And the horses are all in the stalls – not waiting by the gate. Not pawing as they watch me come up the driveway. Huddling like sheep under that slamming din.

They are soaked. Dustin, who doesn’t do abrupt temp changes well, is shivering like a frightened dog. All of them are staring at me. If you own a dog or a horse, you know that look – you may not feel the ESP waves coming at you, but you suddenly want to hurry and feed somebody. Which is the only good way to warm up a horse.

Flash of lightening. Huge thunder. And I am standing in a metal barn. Or at least, I was standing in a metal barn. At this moment in the story (thunder still rolling) I am back in the car, safely propped up by rubber tires, calling Guy for his opinion on my chances of being fried alive out there. But the barn is grounded. And i love my horses. So back in I go – really fighting the door this time as the wind tried to take it from me. Alfalfa hay – just the ticket to keep people on their hooves when the going gets wet. Jetta, now that I am here—and especially after my abrupt and cowardly retreat—has now dug a huge hole in the ground, and is glaring at me.

So I feed them all, poor mud-colored, freaked out things. I run out to the end of the arena (not covered, thank you very much, and if it had been, the cover would have been half way to LA by then) to open the gates to the grass, and the second I turn to run back, another wave of screaming wind and smashing thunder hits. I am beginning to confuse the news with what’s happening here.

Okay. Driving back down the driveway with the wipers and the defroster on. Wrestling those gates down there again. Lock up, driving home. Pull into the neighborhood, and the rain just kind of peters out. By the time I’m in the driveway, the clouds take a break.

Done with me were they?

And the same thing happened yesterday. An old friend called, up here from Texas, and a bunch of us met in town to have our picture taken outside the infamous house we’d all lived in in college. The second we all got there and stood in line at the curb in front, a monsoon hit us. And the second we decided to leave, the rain stopped.

Crimany.

And so I demand that somebody explain this to me.

Does this always happen to you, too?

Post script: Nice to come home to a husband who finds me writing this up and tucks my brand new, very fluffy English saddle blanket around my feet so I won’t take a chill.