After telling you all the things and places I have come to appreciate in Kansas, we made a trip to Southwest Kansas. I’m talking, so far south you can almost touch Oklahoma. This is the area that I’ve lived in for 16 years. And July in Southwest Kansas is hot, I mean very hot, over 100 degrees hot…always! In fact, the small town that I lived in is known for having the highest temperature in Kansas on most days…yesterday was a mild 114 degrees according to Weatherunderground.com. I will have to admit, it does make Pennsylvania look pretty good at this time of year.
At 3:29 am, I saw lightning (rain maybe? surely not!) and as I crawled back into bed, I told My Big Boy, I think it’s “heat lightning”. Now this is important…if any thing makes me angry, really angry (and I don’t get there often), it’s that low chuckle he can emit which says “you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about”. Do you know that chuckle? I heard it in the wee hours of the morning, in fact, I rolled back over and said, “do you NOT believe me?!”, to which he chuckled some more (I can hear it now…you should see the steam coming out of my ears, just thinking about it!) and he replied “No”. That was it! The rest of my sleep was ruined! Was he calling me stupid? Does he think I just make these things up? All of which has me up at 6:03 am. searching the internet for “heat lightening”.
Ah..ha…it’s there in the search engine! But after reading the first article, it concluded that there really is no such thing as “heat lightning”.
That didn’t stop me, I read the second. And this is what I found…
“Quite simply, heat lightning is the reflection of lightning occurring beyond the horizon; reflecting off the bottom of clouds on the horizon.” Now, I’m now sure what that means, but the article did mention “times of drought”…and here in Southern Kansas, it definitely is a “time of drought”.
I also KNOW, in my vast knowledge, that “heat lightning” can be very dangerous and cause range fires in times of drought. (I kid you not, the fire whistle is going off as I type this!)
And I do believe that I’ve “cooled off” a bit, as I stepped outside at 6:15 am with my cup of coffee, it began to sprinkle, hard drops of rain…maybe a total of 10! Just enough to cool me off, and have me laughing, as I think how funny God can be like that, and I wait excitedly for My Big Boy to wake so I can “oh so sweetly” show him the definition of “heat lightning”!
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