A rare dark and stormy morning

It was a rare dark and stormy morning in Charleston.

August, like every other suffocating August in the small seaside city, had drawn on for more than the 31 days it had been allotted on the calendar. Each day passing had moved like a snail, lazily canvasing the steamy, boundless hours from dawn to midnight. Days drenched in salty humidity, Charleston's storied endless summer treated all organisms dwelling in the lowcountry to a non-stop, month long sauna.

But not this day. This day was different. September was tomorrow. A large depression manifesting out across the Atlantic had pulled a bunch of clouds up from out of the warm gulf waters, and then whipped them up into Hurricane Bill.

I had awoken before the sunrise, and could sense the heaviness of the sky outside my bedroom window. There was a different color to the pre-dawn. The mockingbirds were quiet. The crape myrtles were not gently tapping against the gutter. It was a still morning. It was the kind of stillness that all coastal residents understand as the prelude to the beating, battering winds of a waxing hurricane.

And so, the rare dark and stormy morning called me out into the world as the sun rose somewhere far above a thick cover of clouds. In the place of the oppressive August heat, a cool, steady drop of pressure fell down from sky and painted everything living in a more soulful hue. The oak trees were greener and grayer, the carolina wrens were browner and whiter, the crape myrtle blooms were a hotter hot pink.

The blue-on-blue; sky in ocean. The powerful harbinger of sheering wind; heralding the inevitable chaos created by ocean swells and the clash of warm and cold. The horizon was a visual masterpeice.

Dark, losing blue. Deep, swifting blue.

Ocean in sky. The birds did not take flight. A storm approached.