Mud and Storm

It's supposed to rain roughly every other day here from about mid-June to about mid-July, from about 4 pm until shortly after sunset.  The oppressive heat of the day evaporates the water from the Gulf, it drifts over land and starts condensing as it hits the cooler upper air, and we get our daily 60% chance of late afternoon and evening thundershowers.

It didn't do that last year, because there was a massive high stuck over the entire state of Texas all summer, and we had a ridiculous drought with wildfires instead.  (Actually, the drought had already started the previous winter, but no one noticed because we were all complaining that it was so damn cold.)  It's not doing it this year, either.  June was pretty hot and dry, pushing us into mild drought again.  Starting about a week and a half ago, though, we started getting daily thunderstorms - but at 4 in the morning instead of four in the afternoon.  They've slowly drifted forward (along with my sleep cycle) over the course of the last week or so; today's just started at around 3 pm (and in fact blipped the power while I was typing this).

And then, every few years, Huracan roars out of the Gulf to remind us who's boss around here.  His last incarnation was named Ike.  The laws of probability are such that saying we're due for another visit is wrong, and we've had a quiet Atlantic hurricane season so far, despite the Gulf being quite hot - probably because the prime storm-formation area off of Africa is only average temperature-wise, and there's rather a lot of dry air floating around to inhibit storm formation.

(Note: I got interrupted for about 45 minutes here by a lightning-related power outage.)

One of the reasons, I suspect, that I've been feeling the pull of the Levantine pantheon is that tension between the desert behind, the storm above, and the sea before.  The association of Asherah with the sea, vague as it is based on our current sources, matches some of my other sea-deity associations, and of course the defeat of Sea at the hands of Storm is more palatable when Storm is in turn bested by Desert (who then has to be defeated by the Lady of the Beasts to revive the Storm, another note missing from the Babylonian version of the story).  Before I came to Texas, the desert was a far-away threat, even farther away than the mountains, but now, desert and ocean alike are only a few hours' drive away.  One or another may encroach for a summer (especially when we humans have been feeding them so poorly; the fumes of internal combustion only stoke their fury), only to die at the hands of another and return on the next wheel of the year.

Io, Ba'al Hadad!  May you keep drought away from our doorstep a little longer.