Easter in New Zealand can sometimes be pretty rough weather-wise, and we're certainly experiencing some full-on stuff right now, as the photo shows. Our little bay here is socked in with rain, the high tide waves are threatening to overwhelm the beach toilet, and the wind is rocking my Writing Place on its poles!
It's a bad storm, downgraded (fortunately for us) from a tropical cyclone named Tam who came wheeling down to us from the high Pacific Ocean. We get them from time to time and they can be bad, damaging with high winds and rain, power cuts and trees down. Their ferocity seems to be growing, and many put this down to the warming of the planet.
Riding out these storms reminds me of the house we had on the clifftop at Murray's Bay on Auckland's North Shore, the house I grew up in. The living room looked out onto an expansive sight of the Hauraki Gulf down to Auckland city, and it featured three, very large, quarter-inch plate glass windows, to give the best view, lovely on fine days but diabolical during 'a blow', as Mom called these storms. Standing in front of these windows, looking down on monstrous waves sweeping into the bay, far below the cliff, rain lashing, wind thudding, it felt to me like I was on the bridge of a ship.
Now, these plate glass windows had an intriguing feature. They would breathe in a high wind, flexing when very strong gusts hit them. You could put your hand on the glass and feel the movement, or if it was dark, you could see the lights inside the house wavering.
This used to totally freak Mom out.
If there was 'a blow' and the windows were 'breathing', as soon as it was dark she was off to bed. She hated these weather events and the breathing windows.
They really scared her.
I think a deep respect and appreciation for adverse weather took root for Mom during her childhood in Florida where they had terrible lightning and thunder storms that sent the family into the basement, or, for Mom, under the dining table.
As I sit here writing this, the wind gusts pound the house so hard that my computer screen wobbles. While wild weather can be thrilling, it can also be unsettling, and I wonder if any minute a tree might come down, or my neighbour's cat could go flying by (heaven forbid).
Never forget the importance of weather in our storytelling. On a wild day like today, it can add tension, fear, anxiety, making our characters scuttle for the safety of their beds, or head down to that beach in defiance, cling to a STOP sign as the storm threatens to blow them away, and watch as those waves overwhelm the beach dunny.