Richmond Doesn't Get Enough Credit for Its Thunderstorms

People who’ve never lived through a Virginia summer storm season don’t believe me when I describe it, and I get it, I didn’t believe it either before we moved to Richmond. It’s not the storms themselves that are unusual, plenty of places get thunderstorms. It’s the specific rhythm of them here, three, four in the afternoon, sky goes green-gray in about ten minutes flat, and then it just lets loose for forty-five minutes like the whole city needed to exhale.

The power flickers a lot during these, not full outages usually, just enough of a stutter that the router reboots and every clock in the house needs resetting afterward. Most people I know find this annoying, and I understand why, but it’s become one of my favorite parts of living here, mostly by accident. A couple summers back we lost power for real during one of these, maybe ninety minutes, right around dinner, and instead of everyone drifting to separate screens once it came back we just kept going with the candles and a couple of phone flashlights propped against water glasses, and Theo asked if we could play something.

We ended up doing three straight games of something light, I don’t even remember what exactly, probably an early edition of whatever was easiest to set up by lamplight, and it turned into one of those evenings that wasn’t planned at all but ended up being better than most of the ones I do plan. No screens glowing, no notification buzz, just the actual sound of cards shuffling and rain absolutely hammering the windows. My wife made the comment afterward that we should lose power on purpose more often, which, obviously, no, but I got what she meant.

Now when the sky goes that particular green-gray in the afternoon I catch myself almost hoping for the flicker, which feels like a strange thing to admit about a weather event that can genuinely mess up a Tuesday. It doesn’t happen every storm. Most of the time the power holds and we just watch the rain from the porch for a few minutes before going back to whatever we were doing. But often enough that I’ve started keeping a couple of the easiest-to-teach games on a shelf near the door specifically for when it does.

I don’t think Richmond gets talked about much outside people who actually live here, it’s not a city with a huge reputation one way or the other. But summer storm season here has genuinely become one of my favorite stretches of the year, and I never would have guessed that a power flicker mid-thunderstorm would end up being the reason why. Anyhoo, storm season’s coming back around soon enough. I’ll be watching the sky.