The New City and I were rattled from sleep this morning by what sounded like bombs going off, rippling through the wet air and pushing its way into my walls, and it would have caused the pictures to shake and sway if I’d bothered to put any of them up yet, a full month after moving into my one-bedroom apartment on a street named after a tree. The rain came down hard and filled my room with white noise all night, and then the rumbling started in the early morning, long, rolling bursts of sound that seemed to slow down and linger once they arrived. I was too asleep to notice but I imagined the New City must have lit up like a camera flash judging by the sound of it, which is a terrible way to judge anything, much less lightning. A storm like that becomes the stuff of water-cooler talk or on-air radio banter, and, indeed, it did.

I’ve been getting used to the rain, which falls often, but I’d forgotten about the obvious prospect of lightning and thunder.

I’d been living for the past three-and-a-half years on the East Coast, an area that, for what I’m sure are very rational and scientific reasons, rarely sees a good thunderstorm. And in those three-and-a-half years, I can remember only two big storms, the sort of storm when everything feels like violence as God rips a hole through the sky. There were just two, and both times I woke up with my heart pounding in that state between asleep and awake where nothing quite makes sense, and you can’t even manage to panic properly.

Growing up in Calgary, where a few days of hot, dry weather means nature is about to unleash hell, these sorts of storms were common, there’d be a good handful each year.

Sometimes it would seem like the whole world must be shaking, and we’d count the seconds — one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand — between the flash and the explosion. Sometimes there would be no time to count at all and we’d laugh hard because there’s not much to do when it feels like the sky is falling.

We are running through the rain to the movie theatre as the thunder crashes overhead, and once inside we can hear the muted booms of thunder over the sound effects of a loud action movie. Another time, later I think, a relative is in town, from England, and the lights have gone out as she talks to us in a thick accent, so we tie-dye in the dark to the tune of a non-stop crack! crack! crack! The cat runs to a spot in the basement farthest away from the front window, and we swear that last one must have hit right in the middle of our street, because did you hear how loud it was? Another time, still, I can see the hillside park in the middle of the city burning, turning a charred black after what could very well be called an electric fire.

For all the talk of lightning in the New City today, no one stopped to point out how unusual it is, such furious storms, and that’s an encouraging fact that did not go unnoticed. I like thunderstorms very much. It’s comforting somehow to be able to feel like the world is ending while knowing all the while that everything will soon return to normal, like waking up from a bad dream. There’s a sense of security in the chaos of a thunderstorm, because at the heart of them there’s really nothing chaotic about them at all. One more reason to get the pictures up on the walls.