Lightning in Winter- April 18 2026

 

Lightning in Winter

April 18 2026

Lightning in winter,

and I fear that next will be a wild-fire

racing over the snow,

a plague of biting bugs

unfazed by the cold.

Because these days

it feels as if the gods are toying with us,

the earth is out of kilter,

and an unpredictable world

is becoming more dangerous.

I’ve never felt the ground shift under my feet

when a fault line slipped

continents collided.

Never felt the eerie calm

in the eye of a hurricane,

steeling myself

for the fury bearing down.

And never felt the ominous chill

when the sun went dark

in the middle of the day,

heard the birdsong stop

so suddenly

the silence seems loud.

But I once had lightning strike so close

I saw light so white and pure

it could have scorched my retinae

and left me blind,

branded the incandescence

into my brain.

Will never forget that a second before

a static buzz coursed through my skin,

as if I’d strayed too close

to high tension wires

carrying half-a-million volts.

Nor the sizzling sound

of ionized air,
and the thunderclap

so loud
it hit me like the blast wave

of bombs going off.

With a near miss like that

a hard-to-shake fear

is surely understandable.

So now, no season is worry-free

and even winter feels fraught.

And down here

at the bottom of a vast atmospheric sea

roiling overhead,

I’m starting to feel as powerless

as a drowning man

who can’t swim fast enough 

to catch his breath.

It’s technically spring, but you wouldn’t know that here, with below freezing temperatures and literally feet of snow still on the ground. So when I saw in the forecast that tell-tale graphic of a lightning bolt piercing a grey cloud, I did a double-take. Lightning in winter? 

It’s happened before, but it still feels off. And with climate change already making the seasons feel out of kilter and life not only more unpredictable, but more perilous, it’s another unwelcome shock. Especially since after that near miss (it missed me — and anyway, I was protected inside the car — but fried the electrical in the house), when my cautious respect for lightning turned closer to fearful anxiety. 

Lightning can range from 100 million to 1 billion(!) volts. So high tension wires (at most 800,00j — as dangerous as they can be — actually represent a very modest analogy, despite how hyperbolic the comparison might sound.