Prairie storms, people will tell you, have a special feel. On certain afternoons in spring and summer, the air, quivering with energy, releases a faint stale chemical smell, and the earth itself is charged. Lustrous wheat fields, shiny highways, patinated backyards and burnished old cars suggest the existence of another life, more radiant and coppery than our own. The sky’s intensely white brain, ‘cerebro-nimbus,’ one might call it, roils savagely up against the darkening gun-metal blue that some call heaven, the place where the dead live. In a grandmother’s hands, an old leather bible falls open to the Revelations.
