Hot Pot Magazine

By Katrina Gould

The family stood alongside their car, an orange and white VW van circa 1973, on the shoulder of a desert highway. It was dusk in a land drier and dustier than they were used to. Where they stood, the light maintained a late-afternoon quality, but further south, the sky boiled a blue black darker than night. Jagged lines of lightning cracked down from the clouds, white-hot branches contrasting with the darker sky.

The family was heading east after a summer road trip that began in Massachusetts and extended as far west as Oregon. The vacation had worked wonders on the father. After so many drifting summer days strung together, he found more patience and tenderness than he usually had for his family. Which may have been why, when his children asked him to photograph the lightning, he didn’t cite the speed of light, or the rate of human reflexes, or the speed at which a camera’s shutter closes. Instead, he promised four attempts – one for each child – in hopes of capturing lightning.

The children debated the merits of taking a photo at the first sight of lightning versus pressing the shutter button in anticipation of a flaring zigzag, hoping the camera would take a picture at just the right moment.

Earlier, during that same cross-country summer trip, while staying with my grandparents in Madras, Oregon, my dad and brother peeled off to make a two-day climb up Mt. Jefferson. They’d been dropped off at the crack of dawn two days previously, and as my mom and grandfather prepared to collect them again, we looked uneasily at the sky. Weather was moving in, and we thought anxiously of the backpackers coming off the mountain during a storm.

“Let’s leave now,” my grandfather said, an hour earlier than planned. The wind whipped the birch tree beside the driveway into a crazy dance as they pulled out.

Black afternoon light loomed for hours; we didn’t think it could get any darker. When the storm hit, it was anything but gradual. One minute, the high-desert air held its usual parching heat; in the next, sheets of rain and explosions of thunder swept in.

You could say we were used to storms like this. They were not uncommon in Massachusetts where we’d been living. In fact, two years earlier, almost to the day, a thunderstorm moved in on our two-hundred-year-old farmhouse. The house sported seven lightning rods throughout. On that two-years-ago summer day, a storm briefly broke the usual heat and humidity at dinner time. 

I ran to the kitchen to turn off the dishwasher. By now my dad had mostly stopped spanking us, but if an electrical surge blew out the dishwasher motor, he might reconsider that decision in his frustration. I pushed Stop seconds before the crack! that meant the house had been hit. Barely contained, white-blue electricity snaked down the kitchen lightning rod, visible as it blazed toward the ground. I recoiled, my breath lost to fear.

Who can genuinely get used to thunder and lightning storms? They’re too erratic, too loud, too potentially deadly.

Now, we sat huddled in my grandmother’s family room, me, my two younger sisters, my grandma, her younger sister, Alice, and Grandpa Joe, their dead mother’s third husband.

If you were trapped in a storm, and both your parents and your older brother and grandfather were out in that storm, the best person in the world to be trapped with was our grandmother. She’d survived countless storms by then, most of them of the non-weather sort. She had skills for just such moments.

“Let’s play Rummy,” she said. My sisters were eleven and eight. 

Gram’s house sat on the slope toward the top of a hill. The storm brought significantly cooler air than we’d felt all day, and we unlatched the windows a hair to feel the new coolness and to smell the scent of desert dust and sage pummeled by rain.

We were veterans of the rained-out camping trip and knew such things to be unpleasant but not necessarily dangerous. But this was next-level rain. I envisioned my dad and brother descending from the mountain on trails turned to rivers, where the only things tall enough to guide the lightning to the ground were the trees they hiked past.

My sisters and I had been taught to count the seconds between lightning and thunder. It was meant to comfort us, I think, the assumption being that most storms would be far enough away for us to reach five, or four, or even three seconds, and thus be reassured the storm was far enough away to be of no danger.

“-three-one-thousand-four-one-thousand -” CRACK!

“Still a whole mile away,” I said.

Gram dealt the cards. Rummy was her favorite and we’d been practicing in hopes of offering her a little competition. Grandpa Joe didn’t join us. I was used to taciturn men in my extended family, men who couldn’t be bothered to speak with women, and certainly not with children. How strange, to become acclimated to a male body in the room without it being part of the goings-on, a body that expected to be offered food and drink without having to participate in any way.

“-two-one-thousand-three-one-thou- “ CRACK!

I discarded a ten of clubs at the end of my turn. Gram’s eyes twinkled, and she scooped up the entire discard pile, twelve cards in all. “Ha ha!” she laughed with glee.

“That might be your undoing,” Alice said with a wink to us kids. She could say such mocking things and still win prizes for being the most sweet-natured woman of all time.

My grandma’s stepfather, Lewis – Alice’s father and their mother’s second husband – believed children were best disciplined through beatings, and that daughters were an extension of a man’s wife. When you’ve been raised in such crushing harshness, you can go one of two ways in adulthood. You can allow it to leak into your own child-rearing philosophy, or you can treat children like the tender shoots they are. Like the tender shoot you yourself were.

To the extent that my grandmother survived Lewis, she did so through the balm of humor, the unstoppable ability to laugh, to find the absurd, the one nugget of levity that might transform an experience, lighten it up. What started as a survival skill blossomed into a single-minded way of being. Stories abound about her contagious laugh, a sound that could lift a tense atmosphere and invite others to laugh, too, even when they weren’t sure what was so funny.

“Do you think they’ve gotten to the mountain yet?” I asked.

Gram looked at the wall clock. Only seven o’clock. Full-on dark due to the storm. “They’re maybe halfway there.”

The family room had a couch, a couple recliners, and a dinette set. It lacked decoration, unless the clock counted. The overhead light cast an interrogation-room glare.

“The storm will slow them down,” Alice said. “You’ll be in bed before they’re home.”

Flash! BOOM! The storm was on top of us.

My eight-year-old sister hunched over and put her hands on her ears. We all remained fixed in place, as if by freezing we might escape the notice of the storm. The rain roared against the room, and the wind whistled through the window screens, still cool but no longer a relief. We couldn’t hear each other speak. The overhead light flickered.

Within clouds, when some precipitation moves rapidly upward and other precipitation falls, their collision can create the fiery discharge we call lightning. The resulting current of electricity instantly heats the surrounding air. The air in turn expands, then, as suddenly, collapses, creating shock waves along the entire bolt path: thunder.

How long does a storm on the move stay in one place? The answer is both too long and, in the scheme of things, not long at all.

Flash! One-one-thousand-two-one-thousand-three-one-thou – Crack! It was moving away. Maybe staying motionless had helped: Nothing to see here.

The wind and rain eased. We’d be able to talk soon, but now I imagined the storm moving inexorably toward my parents and brother, traveling like some force released from the underworld, intent on destruction.

“Who needs a snack?” Gram asked.

“I brought some Ritz crackers and Cheese Whiz,” Alice announced.

Cheez Whiz was a thing of legend, something we’d never tried. Alice rummaged in her cheerful turquoise beach bag and pulled out a box and a can.

Apparently Cheez Whiz was novel for Gram as well. She peered at the directions on the can. “How does this work?” she asked. 

Alice pulled a sleeve of crackers from the box. “Let’s see,” she said. She tilted the sleeve of crackers toward one after the other of us as if she planned to knight us. We each politely took two, though I craved more.

The Cheez Whiz was aptly named. It did indeed whiz out of its container, wiggling on the cracker, falling all over itself, piling into a squiggly mound before Alice let her finger off the button. “Be careful. It comes out fast.”

She passed it around. My eight-year-old sister cackled with delight as the Cheez Whiz overflowed her cracker onto her fingers. She licked it off, eyes shining. “It wiggles like worms.”

“Maybe it is worms,” Alice said.

“Worms, worms, worms,” Gram chanted. “We’re eating crackers and worms. Mmm, delicious!”

We howled.

“How do these worms compare to ones you’ve had before?” Gram asked.

“Oh, these are the best worms I’ve ever had,” Alice proclaimed.

“Me, too,” my eleven-year-old sister agreed. We erupted again with silliness, laughter discharging our anxiety and ushering in relief that the storm had moved on.

“Crackers and worms, crackers and worms.”

A Polaroid from that night has survived the intervening forty-five years. My grandmother took the picture. None of us sit fully in a chair except Grandpa Joe. The rest of us – Alice, my sisters, me – we all perch on something, the arm of a chair, the back of the couch. Each of us girls holds a Ritz cracker, one raised to toast the photographer. My eleven-year-old sister’s eyes are squinted closed with laughter. The flash from the camera and the overhead light conspire to wash things out, but you can still tell we three sisters have had the Platonic ideal of a summer. We are tanned from hiking Pacific Northwest trails, swimming in Oregon streams, picking blackberries in the blazing August sun, and sitting on countless front lawns from Massachusetss to Oregon meeting cousins we didn’t even know we had.

We look like children who’ve benefited from tenderness, who thrived on it.

Months afterwards, their father developed the film from the trip. Four photos mystified them. Absent any lightning, they couldn’t remember why their father would have photographed this darkening landscape. Then someone did remember, and remembering transformed the photos, changing them from puzzling if perfectly nice landscapes, to tangible evidence of love.

---

---

Most days, hours before it gets light, I can be found at my writing desk. Later in
the day, I see my counseling clients. I’ve spent thirty fulfilling years as a psychotherapist in
Portland, Oregon but my deepest love is writing. So far this year I’ve published in Glacial Hills
Review, Literally Stories, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice. I write in hopes of demonstrating that
we can all examine our complicated and sometimes troubling human experiences, and in so
doing create more compassion for our struggles.