On thunder in an English dawn

There was a strange shivering in the air in the witching hour just before dawn today. A curious, familiar rumbling was shaking me from sleep and I lay still for a moment, trying to frame the word. It was thunder. Real tummy-rumbling thunder, in a sky fizzing with lightning. I was amazed. Since leaving South Africa two years ago, I haven't met real thunder. I was beginning to believe that English skies were incapable of producing such. Rain they have in every permutation, bar the monsoon-kind, but thunder, it never does. Until this morning. I slipped out of bed and knelt on the windowsill overlooking my little garden, watching the fat drops pelt my roses and pool in the geranium leaves, and marvelled at the electric sky. Glorious. I surged a million miles back to that place I used to call home, that incredible land of Highveld skies, where the lightning shows are spectacular and free and can constitute a happy evening's entertainment from the stoep of a farmhouse. Wild and magical and powerful are those storms. In Johannesburg, the cumulonimbus would bubble and rise like dough on a sweltering afternoon and, come four o' clock, the resultant shower would bathe the city clean of its heat and dust and she'd become a woman decking herself in a sunset-tinted dress for a balmy evening under starry skies. So much have I gained by moving to this little island (see previous post) but so much have I lost. The irrepressible rhythm of African drums that would erupt into full cry in the feet of the man selling newspapers at a city traffic light, dancing to music only he could hear but everyone could see. The retina-searing indigo of the jacaranda trees that make Pretoria in October into a hazy purple heaven. The absurd, childlike cry of the hadida bird, mocking from an Camel's foot tree. The smell of the veld grass after the autumn fires have roared through and left the land scorched and barren. But I crept back to bed smiling, because at least the thunder has found me again.