Summer storm strike

Today is one of those days when the air is thick with moisture, and the world is so humid it seems like the sky is pressing down on you. The sun is strong but looks watery, and also seems to be doing it’s best to lay itself directly on your shoulders.
When the afternoon is getting tired, the sky, in that strange way it has in summer, gets bluer and greyer by degrees, storm clouds gathering disguised as clear air, so the sky itself seems to be thickening.
Then comes that stretched-out moment, when the world gets still, when the wind dies down and even the plants seem to hold them selves stiff and ready, until the tension breaks, and the first, fat drops hurtle down.
Traveling along, the air gets thick with that smell particular to mid-summer; that sharp, hot smell of overheated asphalt sizzling in the rain. Then the rain pounds down into soft skin still warm from summer sun, instantly passing through layers of cloth, and clothes get heavy and clingy and seem so much a bother.
Ears ring from almost constant thunder, and laughter bubbles up in response, growling playfully back at the sky, trying to out-do each other.
Standing on the balcony above, looking down, goosebumps from unseen breaths of air ghosting across wet skin. There is so much rain beating the world that the air itself is dark with it, the treetops whipping through the wind like seaweed through rough waters.
Lightning strike, sudden and violent, breaks through the wind and rain and thick air of summer, hisses with power, heat and burning light like screaming, like rage, like prayer, pulses down, a fist pounding the earth, and the tree across the way shudders in its own weakness and succumbs, splitting jarringly, falls as though floating, struck and spent, to earth.