We knew just when it was coming. It was on our calendar. Anticipation was building. It would be boisterous, it would be loud, it would come in on the winds of change, it would feel like a whole fresh start to the world! We’d been feeling low for so long, but pressure had been building, waiting for some one thing to set it all in motion, and when it came, it was sudden, it was strong, it was better than we could have imagined.

We hadn’t had a thunderstorm in months. But it came barreling down the valley right on schedule and scoured the air and brought excitement and thrills. Heck, it brought life. We stood out on the porch and marveled at the tonic effect of pelting rain and that electricity in the air, after a summer of crisping sun and heat, like everything was new again. Like everything was possible again.

Oh, also? Then came the Democratic Convention.

That’s what it takes to cook up a storm, according to the weather people—an unstable atmosphere and some trigger to set it in motion. And then things can happen in a hurry. That trigger came the day President Biden set aside his own well-earned mantle of power, like the autocrat he isn’t, and let the air rise, and all of us with it.

Lightning. It was lightning! You don’t even know how low you are until the lid on you is lifted and suddenly you’re allowed to rise, you’re all charged up. You go from a state of not bothering to open a vein because the knife is all the way across the kitchen, to leaping out of your chair ready to solve real problems, save the planet, fight for justice.

In a new world in which a political convention is so entertaining that you actually watch it for hours and days on end, anything must be possible. This convention was a New Orleans jazz funeral for the whole nation. There we were, trudging to a dirge all the way to the cemetery, and then bam the cornets sounded and the trombones erupted and the dang saints came marching in! Could we do it all? Workers earn enough to live on! Health care for all, clean water and broadband. A sharp pivot away from death fuels to sustainable energy. Putin gets hanged by his little nipples. Everyone gets a clarinet.

Our beautiful thunderstorm came in right on schedule and had no sooner cleared the air than the convention started, and the sun came out for four days, and when Kamala Harris concluded her speech, I went to bed with the window open so I could listen to the new rain. That soft percussion, gentle and restorative, like distant echoes from a jazz band moving on to glory. Like if hope were petals.