This weekend the first of the "severe weather" for the season hit around 1:30 a.m. Saturday morning when frenetic lightning (if lightning can be frenetic) woke me up.

When I turned on the weather radio I heard the National Weather Service had issued a severe thunderstorm warning with possible winds of up to 70 mph. Those winds never came through, but I still spent the storm sitting on the floor of the bathroom, which is the only interior room in this basement-less house.

My usual storm routine is to unplug anything I can and sit in the bathroom with a quilt, the weather radio and any cats that I can con into sitting with me. On Saturday only Ruby sat with me — Giizis spent the storm hiding under the bed. I also keep my flashlight and candles (left over from Y2K) in one spot so I can find them in the dark if the power goes out, and it often does when trees go down on the lines.

This might all sound nutty, but I've been in three straight line windstorms up here, and they are pretty scary. Straight line windstorms are called derechos, and they sometimes have winds of up to 100 mph. I went through two in 1995 and another in 1999.  In 1999, the 4th of July derecho that blew down thousands of trees in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area sent a birch snag through the back window of my car, totalling it. 

During one of those '95 derechos, lightning struck so close to the cabin where I was staying that I saw lighting and heard the crack of thunder simultaneously, followed immediately by a sizzling sound; that hit blew out all the circuitry in my phone.

However, far stranger is what happened to my neighbor. The same lightning strike that blew out my phone sent a ball of lighting through her house. She was awake during the storm and saw the ball lightning enter through a closed window, travel horizontally across her living room, and then exit through another closed window.

!!!

The only other time I've heard anyone talk about ball lightning was when my friend Barb told me about how fire balls came up out of the ground during the burial of someone who practiced Grand Medicine (Midewiwin) up on the Leech Lake Reservation.