By Dianne Bayley

Unlike our friends down in the Cape, our rainy season happens in summer in Jo’burg. The jacaranda blossoms that turn the skyline lavender tumble groundwards under the force of sheets of rain, to collect in a purple snowpile along the roadsides.

The best part of this is that if you’re careful (it’s all wet, you know) and turn the music off in your car - or put the top down - you can drive slowly through the piles of fallen blossoms and hear them pop as your wheels turn.

After what seems like months and months - from around 1 May to 1 September, but multiply by seven after age 40 - of dry, dusty air, the heavens finally open and the rain releases a scent found nowhere else on the planet. Steam rises off tarred roads and miraculous things happen in your garden.

Where once were large patches of sand that swept into your lounge and covered your TV set daily, little green stalks start poking out and make you once again believe in the force of a God who spent much time on the Great Scheme of Things.

My father was 11 years old when he arrived in this country from Dublin. It was winter, and he has never forgotten being amazed at the fact that South Africans could grow brown grass. Anyone who has ever been to Ireland will know it’s covered year round by “40 shades of green”.

But here, we have a palette of earth tones that change colour like chameleons. The dry brown becomes a moist and lush green; emerald carpets the dust and even concrete buildings take on a softer hue.

To describe a Johannesburg thunderstorm takes some doing if you’ve never experienced one. It begins to rumble softly, miles away. The sky turns purple, like a large spreading bruise, and finally drops fall from the clouds and xylophone across the corrugated iron garage roofing. At this point, Pickle (the Little Grey our vet calls a “domestic shorthair”, but we know better) makes a beeline for the bedroom cupboard where she feels safe from the bolts of lightening and the thunder that follows.

If it’s dark enough, the storm can be spectacular. It’s hard to tell if the lightening is being hurled from the skies or upwards from the ground. It can get scary, and you’re best off unplugging your computer and modem. Some years, people are known to go through three or four modems in a season. Of course, “hiding” from the rain under a tree - even a beautiful jacaranda - is an invitation for the lightening to teach you who’s boss. Neither you nor the tree are tought enough to stand up to her, so you’d best find a house or a car to sit in during a Jo’burg storm.

Some years ago a fellow Jo’burger and avid golfer was in Cape Town, where she participated in a friendly four ball. Somewhere between teeing off and the 19th hole, a “typical Jo’burg storm” happened. Being perfect conductors of lightening given the little steel rods they were all carrying, they threw their clubs into their bags and ran towards the club house.

One of the Capetonian caddies was faster - or more afraid - than the others and galloped ahead. His mate tried to ease his own load, and grabbed Caddie No 1’s arm - at which point, Caddie No 1 yelled: “Los uit! Give the Lord a choice!”

If ever you’re in Jo’burg in the summertime, I hope you get to see a full-fledged, all-powerful summer storm. I hope you don’t haul out your umbrella and spoil what could potentially be a day on which you feel young again. I hope you don’t do something daft like get into a swimming pool, and I hope you don’t hang on to your partner. Give the Lord a choice, China!