A Thunderstruck Guardian Angel

At about 1 am this morning I was woken up by what some people called a spectacular thunderstorm.

I had a few more descriptive four letter words for it. I discussed the situation with the frog, the geese, the mongoose, the ducks, the crazy-little-window-pecking-bird and the swallows this morning and they all agree. Thunderstorms are terrible things. If we were a democracy of 10 we would have outlawed it.

I am unapologetic about my obsession with weather. Despite living in Port Elizabeth, mostly because I really am too lazy to move and I REALLY love my house, I remain a true Capetonian at heart hence the obession with weather - and an unabashed fear for thunder and lightning.  Of the millions of things I hated about living in Johannesburg thunderstorms featured in the top 5.

So when the weather woke me up at 1 am last night, I wasn't happy.

To add to my unhappiness in general I received a flirty sms from Love Interest who, in his defence, is clearly not aware of my hatred of thunder and thought it an appropriate time for messages about being awake in the middle of the night. (Should stop adding more and more incidents to my flirting failure list).

First I looked in on the frog who likes to jump around in the garage at night. Have given up on evicting frog and have now named him Arnie. I have started putting down a 5 litre container of water for him as I fear that his stubborn refusal to leave might kill him and at night he can be observed happily swimming in it and then jumping around the garage. Frog was crouching down at the back of the washing machine where he no doubt was assembling his significant arms cache to fight the unknown enemy launching an arial assault.

Found  mongoose in a corner on the stoep. Looking longingly at me standing by the sliding door.

"You can't come in," I said. "You might have rabies."

Mongoose looked offended. I would be too but I couldn't think of another excuse and wasn't going to add to my weather woes by having a half-wild mongoose in my house.

I wasn't going to wake up anybody else - thought I would check on them in the morning.

When 6 am came and went without the normal Egyptian goose-induced riot on my roof, I became worried. Walked outside. Found the geese sitting on the low branches of the pine tree.

"Rough night?" I asked. They looked at me a little bedraggled.

"The thunder! I know!" I exclaimed. The geese were quiet. "O come on,"I coaxed. "It is no worse than the time that the dearly departed Sydney lost his leg." (Sydney is dead now, so maybe it wasn't the best time to bring it up).

The ducks, who seemed to like the fact that there is now a slightly bigger than a three-duck-hole in my drive way waggled past to go for an early morning swim.

"Well good morning," I say. "Glad to see you all survived and we don't have fried duck this morning."

The ducks looked at me funny. The geese looked appalled.

"I wasn't thinking of eating any of you," I said.  Then remembered I decided to stop making apologies.  

"You clearly lost your sense of humour," I say to the geese. The ducks at this stage were happily settling into what is, by my measurement, the new five duck hole - they didn't appear to need more cheering up.

The swallows, sadly, were nowhere to be seen. Guess last night might have been one thunderbolt too far for them. First they had to deal with losing the second story of their house (even though I explained that one of them did an appalling job on the construction) Next they violently rejected my efforts to glue their nest together and proceeded to destroy it - to the mongoose's great distress as he became quite fond of sniffing it.

Put out food for everybody though hoping it will revive the spirits.

Then the crazy-little-window-pecking-bird appeared starting, as usual his incessant irritating pecking at every single window in the house. I have a friend who swears that my guardian angel is a crazy-little-window-pecking-bird but really, if he was, I will ask Arnie the frog to shoot him in the knees. Surely mine is slightly more glamorous - however I doubt if you would find one more resilient as in our thunderstruck little corner of the world it was the only small ray of normality we' ve seen for hours.