Splish splash: The Gorge near [redacted] in the Victorian Alps. Photo: Max Stainkamph
I remember as a kid slowly chuckling to myself as my mum rushed around the house in the hour before a cool change arrived, opening every window and door possible.
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It seemed a bit strange to 12-year-old me — the bedrooms were air-conditioned, so why did we need to stress about cooling the rest of the house down?
While rushing around my home on Tuesday night, with the half of the house that is air-conditioned no longer the half I sleep in, I chuckled.
I’ve made a sudden about-face on thinking summer is better than winter, actually, and have been sweating my way to sleep for the better part of a month. How the tables turn.
I sat up and listened to the storm, because every time I hear a summer storm roll in at night I’m absolutely awestruck.
The petrichor (which is the fanciest word I know and is basically the smell of summer rain) is my favourite smell bar none, and there’s something poignant about the first, hesitant, fat drops of rain that land on the concrete like blowflies.
Awesome: A thunderstorm over the valley is one of the more awe-inspiring things to witness. Photo: GETTY IMAGES
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My thoughts dried up as the rain fell on my tiny shed, which has two purposes — to house my crappy lawnmower (sorry, lawnmower) and to make music with its corrugated iron roof when it rains.
On Tuesday, the music of the shed roof combined with the orchestra of rolling thunder, which sounded like it was rumbling across the whole Goulburn Valley, rolling from Seymour and Yea up through Nagambie and Murchison and continuing further north.
Granted, I might feel slightly different about a truly destructive storm like the one that hit Tatura just before Christmas, but this felt scintillating.
I felt small and insignificant — and so incredibly alive.
The storm had marched its way across Victoria and would keep marching until it hit the mountains.
I was in those mountains last weekend, squirrelled away in a tiny gorge near the town of [redacted], with friends (who are locals) who told me in no uncertain terms not to give away their secret swimming spot.
There I splashed, in temperatures a few degrees cooler than on the plains stretching from Benalla to Bendigo, without reception, without checking my phone, without a care in the world, in water clearer than I thought was legal in this country of flat, slow, brown rivers.
I don’t tend to do new year’s resolutions any more, but I take stock at the end of every year and make new year’s suggestions, which makes me feel better when I inevitably abandon them by March.
However, I decided last year included too many thoughts and too much stress, and swanning about at a swimming hole and staring at the roof listening to the awesome power of a summer storm is getting my new year’s suggestion off to a good start.
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