Storm Watching Tosh
by tannim
June 05, 2012
Tosh flinched from his clay at the loud bang from outside. His hand shook, his ears twitched, the little squirrel face he'd been working on was squished. It took him a moment to realize it had been a crash of thunder. Looking at his mom, he was sort of glad to see that she had flinched too. That stormy boom had shaken the house.
The four year old giggled after a moment. "That one was loud!"
"It sure was. The weather report said we'd get a good storm tonight. I hope it's not too good." Esme set her crushed clay tail down and reached for the little plastic detailing knife again. "Let's try to finish before it gets worse. Here, do you remember how the face goes?"
Tosh concentrated on rolling a small ball out of brownish clay then looked at it. "Ummm..." He squeezed at it, but his grasp of anatomy was quite poor.
By the time the kid stopped squeezing, it was just a random blob. Esme smiled and cupped his hands to help him. Teaching him how to work clay was relaxing as nothing could be broken except the cheap plastic cutlery she used as tools. Tosh rather liked it because it was messy and sticky and he got to squish things.
Another crash of thunder and lightning flashed brightly enough to turn the dark sky into the brightest of days, then everything went darker than before. The power went out. Esme stood for a moment, waiting for the lights to come back on, and they did flicker on, then immediately back out again.
"Well, I guess that's enough for now. We'll set the box over it and try again tomorrow. I'm glad modeling clay doesn't dry out."
"Wow, look, mommy!" Tosh pointed to the window and rain poured outside, lit up by almost constant flashes of lightning. "Can we go watch the storm?"
"If you promise not to go any further than the porch, yes." She hugged him and helped him to the bathroom. "Come on, lets wash our hands first."
Outside the storm was still raging as they sat watching it. The porch let in some of the spray when the gusting winds blew it in but most missed them. With the breeze and the spray, the two goats were pleasantly cool after the hot day.
Approaching evening turned the sky from a dark blue to a pretty purplish black. Against that, the rapid flashing lightning was even prettier. Tosh watched it with rapt interest.
Storms had been scary when he was little. They still were, but he found them fun anyway. He put his hands on his knees and just stared into the sky. When the thunder clashed he laughed and the light show kept him smiling as the lightning kept wandering across the sky.
Esme watched her son as much as she watched the storm. It was good to see him not crying during long rumbles of thunder. She did have to reach out and grab his arm when the first balls of hail fell, Tosh really wanted to see them.
"No, Tosh. That's hail. Ice falling from the sky. It hurts if it hits you and you don't want to go out in it." Esme let him go when a dime sized ball of ice bounced in and hit his shin. She could tell he'd learned his lessen from how he rubbed the spot. "Are you ok?"
"Uh huh..." He stopped rubbing at the barely sore spot and picked it up. "It's not round! Look, it's got a bunch of bumps on it. See, Mommy? It's not round."
The mother goat dutifully peered at it. "You're right, it's not. You make much better round things out of your clay."
Tosh played with it a bit, then threw it into the still hailing storm outside the porch. The ice balls were really piling up. They were getting bigger, too, and making so much noise that neither goat could hear anything else. Esme grew worried as a good sized branch broke off from the tree across the street with a loud wooden snap.
"I think we'd better go in, Tosh." She had to shout to be heard, only to find the hail suddenly drop off as the storm shifted back to rain.
Tosh tugged at her hand around his wrist. "No, I wanna watch it all night!"
"You can't stay outside all night, your bed would get lonely." His mother glanced at the house, no power still. The whole neighborhood was black except for candles and flashlights. "But I guess a little longer is ok. At least the hail stopped."
Tosh scooted closer to the edge of the porch and gathered a couple handfulls of hail. He hurriedly pulled it back before his mom noticed he was too close to the edge, then squeezed it together. The stuff was a lot like snow. Cold, wet, sort of sticky if compressed. Kind of like clay that way too. Only clay didn't get him the swat on his butt that the hail suddenly did.
"I saw you, Tosh. Come on, time to go in. It's bed time anyway. I told you to stay away from the storm. What if a branch had chosen that moment to fall or if a lightning bolt..."
A branch landed right where he'd been to gather the hail. It wasn't big, but it was big enough to have hurt. Tosh yelled and ran into the house. His mom was right behind him.
