Spent most of today running kids back and forth to doctors' appointments -- Garrett to the allergist, and Ethan to his one year ENT appointment. One of his tubes has worked its way into the ear canal, so it looks like we will be back to hypervigilance with him as far as ear infections go. Apparently even with the tubes he had an excessive amount of infections -- or at least judging by both the nurse's and doctor's reactions he did. I have a feeling we will be looking at more tubes in the near future.

Driving home through rush hour traffic from our last appointment gave me some time to think, though, especially since the kids were exhausted by this point (after 4 PM) and Kate and Ethan fell asleep. It's been windy but not particularly cold all day, and some patchy slate-colored clouds were moving in, trailing rain like a veil across the horizon. It's that time of year when I think of Storm Clouds and remember why I set it in the Midwest in the first place. Every so often I remember when the seeds of the novel were first planted, the summer I was thirteen and my family and I took a trip to Blakesburg, Iowa to see an antique airshow and fly-in. We stayed overnight in St. Louis one night so we could see the Arch, and another couple nights at the house of my dad's best friend from childhood, in the thriving metropolis of Chapin, Illinois (pop. 600). Having always grown up surrounded by hills at least -- even those years in northeastern Ohio -- the Midwestern landscape was like coming into an alien world for me. I remember it was not the oceans of corn or the pancake flatness of central Illinois that impressed me most about the Midwest. It was the sky. We took our trip in August, when the sky is a heavy blue and closes against the earth like the curved door of a locket. In the absence of mountains, there's nothing to hold that sky up. It's just you and corn and blue.

And then there were the thunderstorms, and the way you could watch the rain sweep in from the west, and see it coming from good miles away. The sun punching holes in the clouds, and rainbows that looked as if you really might be able to find their end.

It's good to sometimes remember why you write what you do -- why you have written what you've written. I think it's called sense of wonder.

I caught myself thinking this afternoon that we were about due for a thunderstorm, a nice one that doesn't make all the tornado sirens go off, just a big light show and some booms and to see the wind whip the branches of the trees before the buds break, so the flowers don't get shredded. To hear rain pounding on the roof in that comforting way when you're snug in your bed and you don't have to go out anywhere.

But the weather forecast for tomorrow morning calls variously for snow, rain, and wind. So I suppose we will have to endure a little more winter before we make it to spring, in spite of rain sweeping by in veils and the daffodils in my neighbor's front yard (too cold in my backyard yet) and the forsythia bushes that are just beginning to show their first blush of yellow.