In a Missing Thunderstorm

I've been in Connecticut for several days now. I've seen their wildlife and eaten their pancakes. And yet here I am, well after 1 am on a Sunday night, still quite hopelessly jet-lagged.

My other current home is 13 hours in the future, in humid, charmingly hyperactive JeonJu, South Korea. The cherry blossoms have been out there for a few weeks now, and we have been comfortable, even hot, in t-shirts. But here in Southern New England I'm wearing every layer of clothing available to me, and trying in vain to fight a bad cold. I think I've actually blown out my eardrums coughing.

I've been noticing that my family here in CT is much more intuned to weather and animals and so on than we are in JeonJu. My sister pulls the car over at the sight of a porcupine; my dad arrives late for burritos because he and my step-mother needed to stop and watch the bald eagle's nest by the Connecticut River. My brother-in-law sets the computer default to check the weather. And so I know I can count on cold rain for the next five days.

Tonight the chance of thunderstorms is 100%. Yet I don't hear a thing. This could be due to my aforementioned ear drum damage. But I'm in a cabin in the middle of a nature preserve, where I would surely hear anything nature had to offer. In fact I'm quite sure I can hear an owl at the moment, scaring the mice away.

At this moment when the rest of the world is asleep or too far away to point out that I'm taking myself much to seriously, this seems an apt metaphor for my life- awake and listening, but somehow missing the thunder and lightning.