Weather: Cloudy, With a Chance of Marshmallows

Weather forecast for tonight: dark. - George Carlin

It's been a stormy week, and the weather put on quite a show Wednesday night, with what looked like potential tornado cells moving through southern Pennsylvania. We were lucky. We got mostly just rain in the central part of the state where we live. Others didn't fare so well.

Thursday, the weather forecasters were originally calling for more rounds of possibly severe thunderstorms, but those somehow never materialized. Instead, we got layers of dark, dramatic clouds that stuck around all day, looking ominous and threatening. "A storm is coming!" they seemed to say.

When I drove home, I noticed the light was starting to break as I turned onto the road where we live. We had seen a local farmer making hay on Sunday morning in this field while it was still dry, and it was full of round hay bales wrapped in white plastic.

There had been at least two machines in the field, one of them the machine that makes the bales, and the other the machine that wraps the bales in plastic. This was a show I watched with fascination, of course, as I had seen the plastic-wrapped bales before, but never the actual process of them getting wrapped.

As I saw the sky brightening on this day, I stopped and parked my car in the parking lot of the local vet's office on the corner and ran across the road to stand in the field to get a better look. The sun began to come out behind me and it made the field shine in an odd shade of yellow-green. In the distance were layers of clouds, with mist rising.

I could almost imagine the bales to be huge marshmallows that had somehow fallen from the sky, in a freak and random act of nature. If you thought rain or snow was bad, just wait till you get bopped on the head by giant flying marshmallows. Take that, all you who haven't noticed yet that the climate is changing!

In the U.S., there is a summer snack that people like to eat called s'mores. It involves toasting a marshmallow over a campfire and placing its warm, ooey-gooey goodness, along with a piece of chocolate, between two graham crackers. You are welcome to these marshmallows to make some if you like, but you'll have to provide your own huge pieces of chocolate and extra-large graham crackers!

In honor of the weather theme of this posting, the song to accompany this strange rural scene is Duran Duran's 1982 hit, Hold Back the Rain.