Boston, July 24, 2012

★★★★ Tedious heat through midday gave way to an incoherent but captivating cavalcade of phenomena. Thunder and a downpour arrived, with rain sluicing off the rooftops, but the heat and sun rallied back, unbroken. Then came another downpour at dinnertime, but the late sunshine returned even as the rain continued pounding down. When I used to live in Boston, a decade and a half ago, the guy who did weather every day on the telephone was named Rob Gilman, and one morning he went ahead and predicted afternoon rainbows, and he was correct. These restaurant windows faced northwest, the wrong way for rainbows, but when I checked my hunch on Twitter afterward, there had in fact been some. We were facing southeast at sunset, as light reflected off buildings in the distance. A blinding streak of coral ran down the glassy side seam of a concrete tower. After dark, storms came one last time, with protracted rolls of thunder and wash after wash of lightning illuminating the clouds. Due overhead, in the confusion, the orange-brown city-at-night cloud cover opened to reveal one patch of delicate pale blue clouds higher up, and near that another patch of deep navy. Who would even want to try to understand? The rain let up, the lightning glimmered gradually off, and there was a cool breeze in the dark.