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Prairie Thunderstorms...

...washing away the expanse with fat drops, thin drops, breaking up the clouds while the lightning cracks apart the gray. Rumble, rumble, scattered amidst the lightning strikes, helps one to forget briefly that the rain is sometimes torrential. From the perch of a third-story apartment window in Lincoln Park, looking out above the many-colored bricks of Chicago, the violence is peaceful, almost meditative. Because the rain always prevails, there is a sense of hope that the lightning bolts will cease their terror, that the sky will fight its way back to azure wonder, and that the sun will shine again. The hope signals brilliant colors sometimes, especially at dusk, when the various clouds grab the reds and pinks and oranges and blow them up in velvety contours across the sky.
For the uninitiated, prairie thunderstorms are common during the summer months of the American heartland; even with their haphazard nature, thunderstorms are quite regular and soothing from afar. For a moment, when the thunder subsides, the quietude of the raindrops becomes the bridge to the contemplation of a thousand languid summer days, days of the heart's free roaming amongst the joys of life. Sometimes it takes violence to disturb the psyche into understanding and revelry of hope.

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