A rain dance with my neighbors

Good morning, DMV! It’s Tuesday, March 17.

Growing up in the rural Midwest, I loved watching the storms roll in. Sometimes the skies would turn a hue of yellowish-green or orange. The cumulonimbus clouds would come charging like football players across the cornfields, sheets of rain sweeping across the horizon.

Yesterday, here in the DMV, there was a nervous excitement in my home about the forecast for wild weather. My family made sure to get home safe by early afternoon. After clearing the drains and doing a check around our yard, my husband baked bread and an apple crumble in case we needed snacks to get us through an evening power outage.

But the afternoon rain in my neighborhood was mostly sprinkles. It was a dud. Not that I was longing for destructive winds, but I do have an appreciation for the occasional tempest. One of my family’s favorite things to do after a storm is going to check out the swollen creek near home and the fallen trees — their crowns, once so high in the air, brought to eye level. Well, not yesterday.

Paula Whyman, the reader who sent in today’s photo of the storm clouds in Rappahannock County, Virginia, wrote to me at 8 p.m. last night that the storm was still quite lively at her home.

Then about an hour after she wrote to me, my daughter and I heard the wind pick up. Our ears perked up. We went to our screened storm door and listened. The whistling wind approached from the west. The highest limbs of the older trees around my home swayed.

My daughter pointed across the street at our neighbors, who were also at their window, watching the action outside. These neighbors just moved in, and I’ve yet to meet them. We could only see their silhouettes.

I knew what I had to do: I waved wildly at them. (My daughter, embarrassed, told me to stop.) Then they waved back at me. So I threw both hands in the air and did a celebratory dance. (My daughter, who had been standing beside me, quickly moved away.) The neighbors — bless ‘em — reciprocated and danced back at me. Hurrah.

The Northern Virginia Bird Alliance is hosting a few free events later this month:

I also happened across this evening bird event (for $12) that sounds pretty cool.

Paula Whyman — the author of “Bad Naturalist,” a memoir about her “trials and tribulations trying to restore native meadows on the mountain” where she lives in the northern Blue Ridge region of Virginia — sent in this photo from “an interlude” in yesterday’s storm.

“When I took the photo, I had stepped outside of the house. I was writing (ie, gazing out my office window) when I saw the heavy clouds sitting on the horizon and decided to take a closer look. I’m relatively new to life on a mountaintop, and I find the changing sky mesmerizing,” Paula, 61, wrote in an email last night.

At about 8 p.m., she said it was still “blowing and pouring,” and mid-morning yesterday, there were “high winds and back-to-back tornado alerts that sent us to the basement with the dog! It’s almost always windy here on the mountain, but this was definitely more wind than on a typical day.”

Share your recent photos of life in the DMV here.

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