fireworks on July 3rd

One thing we have in upstate NY is serious weather. Saturday was gorgeous! Picnic weather. Sit outside in the back and look at the wildlife through binocs - weather. Couldn't have been prettier and because the light in my studio was lovely, I started a self-portrait. Self-portraits are always helped mightily by good lighting. Candles would probably be best. But yesterday - Sunday the 3rd of July - we woke up to major rain. It was dark and heavily grey outside and so much water was falling that you could see the drops smashing against the road and splashing back up so that there was like a thin layer of foam on top of the asphalt. The self-portrait was hopeless. I tried, but with no light coming in, it started to look like I was painting myself in a dark mask, so I stopped and since I had this little marigold in a jar out there in the studio, painted it. But that is not the story. The story is that sometime in the mid-afternoon, there came a lull in the thunder and lightening that had been booming around the valley all day and then all of a sudden out of nowhere a flash of lightening and an unbelievably loud crack of thunder simultaneously crashed down around our farm. I was so startled that I dropped my palette on the floor! Yes, the lightening hit the property but amazingly the only harm was that it took a limb off of a tree in the front of the house and for some reason - bypassing all other electrical systems - knocked the phone out. I went back to my studio after my heart slowed down and painted a second flower, but that effort failed. Not a surprise.