From an early age, I had no fear of thunder. To me, thunder was just the snap and rumble of white bedsheets in my mother's hands, their clean-dried linen scent nestling beneath an equally clean, grey sky. The sky that was the same color as Mama's hair, though she was still a young woman.
My Mama.
Her hair, as I said, was the same soft, clean grey as the clouds that rose above us in a high, dense layer. Her skin, once you got to know her, was not the pale peach it appeared to be at first, but a curious dusky bruise color, grey and blue and sometimes purple. My Mama's eyes were most peculiar, as well; an intense, deep slate that could shift from milky white to onyx black.
That was my Mama, and I loved her dearly, as did Papa.
I was a homeschooled child: Papa taught me to hunt wild game in the tangled forests behind our house and to raise good crop from seed – sweet, buttery corn and golden sheaves of wheat – while Mama taught me to listen to the sky and wind and clouds, to summon thick fogs and damp drizzles that lasted for days, while I was still getting the hang of things. Under their joint tutelage I, a little girl ten years of age, sometimes felt myself to have experienced more of the world than many an eighty-year-old, without ever leaving our plot of land.
Sometimes, in my youth, Gramma and Grampa – my father's parents – would visit us, and then I would learn to knit and embroider, to weave cloth and stories alike, to whittle my life into the surface of a beautiful driftwood log. But Mama's parents never once visited us, as far as I can recall.
So I grew, and as birthdays came and went, I reached the eve of my seventeenth.
That night, I did not sleep. Through the crack in my bedroom door, bronze firelight poured, syrupy, into the darkness, and I could hear Mama and Papa conversing. Their murmuring voices rose and fell, rose and fell like the waving stalks of wheat that stretched out, turned silver by the moonlight, beyond my curtained window. I had noted a change in Mama's demeanor the past time, a change that worried me; her tattooed skin grew darker, almost black, her eyes were no longer sunlit but always cast down, dim and grey. Papa would hug her, and stroke her hair, but it would make no difference. She would stand outside, in the wide expanse of our cornfield, and stare up at the sky for hours, be it blue or starred or grey with clouds. At such times, I could feel a net pull tight over my heart, twinging it painfully.
That night, I heard Mama crying. Had I listened further, it may have terrified me into running to her for safe harbor, but instead I shut my eyes, rolled over to my side, covered my ears. Only in that fashion could I induce sleep to overtake me.
That morning, I was seventeen.
We all ate breakfast together; my birthday gifts were, from my father, a large gold timepiece which showed the months and seasons and moon cycles in addition to sun cycles, and from my mother, a silver chain on which a beautiful jewel was strung. It was the shape of a raindrop, an obsidian-black raindrop, but enchanting sapphire and white sparks swam in it when the light hit it.
I accepted these gifts, and went to the bathroom mirror, to try on the necklace. When I did so, and looked up at myself, I became aware of certain changes in my appearance that I had failed to pick up on in the past few months, rarely as I saw my reflection.
My previously blonde hair had faded to a pale and washed out sun-color, almost white at the tips, almost grey at the roots. My eyes, which had been unequivocally hazel, were darkening and settling to black or perhaps a dark iron. And my skin had paled and blossomed with indigo patches, billowing like clouds.
My hand tightened on the clasp of the necklace, and I turned to go back to the kitchen.
Papa's elbows were on the table, his head in his hands. I set down the timepiece he'd given me, gently, in front of my chair, where it continued to tick to itself, and then went outside to join Mama in the cornfield.
We stood side by side, and gazed at the sky. As I watched, Mama gave a low, clear whistle, and from the white wisps that hung in the north a dark grey stormcloud condensed and began to spread. Her eyes were vibrant, nearly blue, a pure shade I had not seen in a long, long time. My whistle joined hers;  the wind gusted, more clouds mushroomed from nothing in the east, west, and south. The storm grew, above us, the wind pulled at our hair and shirts and wandered through the wide fields of our farm.
The grey of the clouds deepened, lowered, darkened, and a low rumbling crescendoed to a bone-shuddering boom, accompanying one blinding, forked lightning flash, another, another. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and lightning sparks began to leap, electric, between Mama's fingers. Without looking, I knew that if I was to take my necklace off and see the jewel, the blue and white flecks within it would be brighter, dancing a mad dance.
Mama leaned over to me, pushing as against some sort of a thick pressure field. The wind howled in my ears such that has she said something, I would not have heard her; but she did not speak, only smiled.
In that smile there was love, and silence, and awe, and sadness. I forgot the outside storm in an internal turmoil of my own, looking into Mama's blue, blue eyes. I was engulfed in memories of clean bedsheets hung on the clothesline, the first fog I learned to summon under her watchful gaze, her hands holding mine as I took my first step, all the things I recalled and the things I thought I had forgotten, and I knew then it was all ending and Papa had already said his good-byes.
Mama leaned over to me, and with a last push against the invisible barrier between us, gently placed a staticky kiss on my forehead. The way she'd done every night for the past seventeen years. Then her eyes widened, and so did her smile, and her hands which had found mine in the last moment let go and she vanished in a whirlwind of sparking lightning and pouring water and bone-chilling wind.
And I stood alone in the cornfield.

For those for whom this is not enough, I can offer an epilogue, of sorts.
Mama did not abandon us, nor leave us entirely. Every now and again, a big storm, a more beautiful and longer-lasting one than is usual, rolls in from the north and pours rain on our farm and us. When that happens, Papa and I are happy; I sometimes spot a single raven in this storm, and wave to it, just in case. Papa harbors no hard feelings for her. For when Mama and Papa had married, they'd known neither one of them could be entirely happy in either of their elements, but this sort of happiness had been more than enough to last them seventeen years.
And I?
My path lies beyond our gentle farm with its stormy skies. Where I shall go, I cannot say. But I know that all the power of the wind and rain lies at my back.
And I have a necklace to prove it.