One Mississippi...Two Mississippi...

I am awake in the wee hours of the morning, summoned by the noise and power of the first real thunderstorm of the season rolling through the river valley in which I live. Without even thinking about it, I find myself counting the intervals between each flash of lightning and burst of thunder, and my mind is flooded with memories of comforting and empowering my children in the dark and stormy nights of their tender years. 

The helper is a simple meditation and sleep ritual that I never realized was either one of those things until now. The children would call to me or come to me in the dark, frightened by the storm, and we would wind up snuggled together, sometimes just one of them and me, sometimes all of us snuggled together on the couch. In the lull after a boomer I would ask "Are you ready? Let's watch now," and they would very nearly hold their breath, waiting for the night sky to light up. When it did, we would count outloud together: One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. 

BOOM! The thunder would come, and they would jump, but their eager minds were already busy watching for the next flash to cross the sky. As they grew older those lulls between flash and boom were often filled with questions about different kinds of lightning, how storms move, or what animals do during storms. They each went through a phase when they just had to spell out the word, Mississippi, in the sing-song rhyming chants so many of us know from childhood, and I remember a night one of the girls dissolved into giggles because she was missing her top front teeth and couldn't say the word. 

I would gently encourage them to hush, to watch, to listen, to quiet their breathing so they could hear. They learned that they could tell when the storm was drawing closer and when it was moving away. The lull between boom and flash would lengthen, their fear would settle, their breathing would slow, and eventually they would not so much fall back to sleep as to be carried there by the peace of the lull and the sound of the rain. 

Sometimes when it storms now, I wonder if they remember. 

The boomers have passed through now, and the sound of the rain is hypnotic and sweet. My gardens are being watered, and I am going to wrap myself in gratitude and allow the rain to lullaby me back to sleep.