It has been a very stormy summer.

I just got yet another weather alert telling me it may start raining shortly, which feels less like a forecast at this point and more like a personal threat.

We’ve had the rain. The thunder. The lightning. A giant tree in my yard was struck by lightning. Another storm knocked out our power for six hours. One morning, the rain was so relentless that I couldn’t even walk to the train station, so I simply didn’t go to work.

Apparently, even the weather has decided we need a break.

And maybe there is something oddly fitting about all of this.

Because my thoughts have been stormy, too.

As I work my way backward through old emails, I keep stumbling into pieces of my own past including people, conversations, disappointments, losses, decisions, things I remember one way and now see another. I find myself searching my memory the way I search my inbox, trying to reconstruct what happened, what I felt, what I knew then, and what I understand now.

Memory, like weather, is not particularly cooperative.

Sometimes the sky clears. Sometimes another dark cloud rolls in just when you thought you were finished with the storm.

But perhaps that’s the point.

We don’t always get to control the weather or the thoughts it stirs up. Sometimes we just have to sit through it, listen to the thunder, let the rain fall, and trust that eventually, inevitably, the sky changes.

Although I wouldn’t mind if it could change before the next weather alert.