Storm of a Lifetime
I left for work yesterday while Chikusei was boasting blue-grey skies and few clouds. Somehow, only ten kilometers down the road, these skies were engulfed by a pervasive blackness. It looked as if someone had taken a black felt pen to the horizon; the landscape was drowned in murk. After seriously considering the consequenses of returning to the amiable weather at home, I diligently carried on into the abyss. It was like I passed under a sheath and into a new world. At 12:30 pm I was forced to put on my headlights; street lamps were throwing visible pools of light. Then winds: gusts of winds sprang up and attacked my car so that I had to clench my fists on the wheel just to stay on the road. Fat raindrops began falling on my windsheild; antagonizing me, predicting the inevitable. The raindrops quickly turned into an onslaught of hail. The hail punished the road and my paint job until morphing into slick fist-fulls of sleet that slopped against the asphalt. Even at full-tilt, my wipers could not withstand the blasts. The sleet came down so frantically that it created veritable lakes among the farmer's fields and along the roadsides. Lakes that wanted to swallow my car whole. The low blackness was shooting bolts in all directions. Four and five at once, striking within kilometers, within meters, of my car. I had to get to work on time. Looking like I bathed in my clothes, I ran through the watery torrent and into the school; even the teachers seemed awed by this monstrous weather. Five minutes into my first class of the day, I asked the children the proverbial: "How's the weather today?" Upon consulting the window we all agreed, "Today is SUNNY!"We don't have storms like these back home.
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