April 7, 2023 — Wednesday was as whirly of a weather day as Northern Michigan has had in a long time. We woke in the morning to an alarm clock of thunder and rain thick as sheets. I walked Sonny later that morning through a water-soaked world where every branch and bush glistened with water drops. The swamp between our house and Lake Michigan was deep and searching for a willing place to drain. Its searching had the intensity of current under the slippery wooden walkway.
When I got to Lake Michigan, the bay was swollen and mounded. I watched as waves appeared out of nowhere to tumble off themselves onto shore. The lake had an electrified greenish glow—maybe from a lightning strike or just from all that magnetic rainfall dropping its energy with every splash. Sonny was loving it all and happily drinking freshwater again after spitting out half of the salty Atlantic this past week down in St. Augustine.
Around noon, another storm crashed against us with wind and rain and thunder. It rumbled over Little Traverse Lake about as long and noisily as a 300-car freight train. And then, like the four-mile Union Pacific, that noisy house-shaking storm passed into silence.
I headed to meetings as the temperature rose to 60 with humidity as high as the tropics. It was strange to feel such warm dense humidity in early April. I was at work, and one of my VPs and I had our first outdoor meeting of the year leaning against my pickup truck in front of HQ. From that humid hour of sun, the winds snapped on like giant car wash dryers and within minutes everything in the north was dry. And then the air cooled as winter got back in the action. I went to bed that night with a full moon so bright and high overhead it had nearly the entire surface of Little Traverse Lake reflecting it. I didn’t catch what all that reflection meant till morning, when I saw the ice was gone.
On some rare days, and this Wednesday was certainly one of them, you just let go and let this whirly weather be the center of our attention.
