Embedded Thunderstorms.

Wrapped up in a line that rolled in here from Yadkinville and points west, but by the time they made it into the Piedmont Triad generally and 27408 specifically, all the bite left in them was a few cloud-to-cloud lightning strikes, a few throaty rumbles of thunder. Enough, though, to rouse the dog from her sleeping and bring her in here to bravely smash herself up against my side and eventually settle down in my chair. The dog is not a huge fan of storms, embedded or no.

This all comes with terms like isentropic lift and stratiform clouds, but for those of you laypeople out there, an embedded thunderstorm is just that: embedded. In some other less fancy rain. It rains a while, and then, um, literally, boom. This as opposed to the apocalyptic black-sky Fourth-of-July oh-shit find-the-dog kind. So: for those of you just tuning in: (a) It's raining, in a really lovely way. A true and serious rain. (b) Isentropic is a tremendously fine word, as are all of these other weather words beginning with the letter I. Today's ANYLF, in fact, is brought to you by the letter I.

This is going to come with at least one pretty hard freeze on the back side of it, if not a second one, and that either will or won't take out the daffodils already in bloom. There's not any really good way of covering them, I don't think, so we'll just have to ride this one out— Though if my neighbor around the corner with her ten zillion daffodils puts sheets out, maybe I will too. We've got some good Old Greensboro people in this neighborhood, people who know things about azaleas and tomatoes and how things work in general. Keep your eyes open and there's some fine knowledge to be had, knowledge, I suspect, almost entirely free of fancy weather words. These are the kind of people who will tell you after a storm like this one, That was a pretty good storm. They don't maybe much care whether it was embedded.

There are at least two levels of being, I guess: Paying attention to what comes out of the ground and the sky, and everything else. I'm not going to privilege one over the other. I'm just saying that I don't ever want to get too far away from the first one, that I'm trying most days to remember that maybe the first thing we ought to do when it thunders is get out of bed and go look for everybody else. After that—once everybody's accounted for—we can look up all the cool weather words.