Hutzell: Summer starts today. Welcome to storm season on the Chesapeake Bay.

Before a summer storm washes over our corner of Annapolis, the leaves on the willow oak in our backyard turn upside down.

Prevailing south winds give way to gusts from the west. Those blade-shaped leaves of green flip on the shifting air, their silvery undersides turned upward to the sky.

If I’m smart enough to catch this moment of transcending energy, I know a storm is on the way. More likely, I’ll see it first on my phone’s weather app.

We are now in storm season on the Chesapeake Bay.

The solstice arrived at 4:24 a.m. Sunday. That’s the start of astronomical summer, and when the sun sets at 8:33 p.m., it will mark the end of 14 hours and 54 minutes of continuous sunlight.

Summer is for day camps and beach trips, pool days and barbecues. Crabs and beer.

All the while, you have to think about thunderstorms flipping your picnic table and plunging you into a blackout. It’s a trade-off, I suppose.

In a warming world, storms are coming faster, stronger and sooner on the bay. We’re not allowed to say “climate change” in America anymore, so maybe it’s just a little summer fever.

Wind gusts up to 80 mph surprised us in March. March! That’s not summer.

Trees and power lines came down, blacking out 20,000 businesses and households across the region.

They came again on Friday June 12, a day my phone told me was 95 degrees in Annapolis. It was the hottest day so far this year, and capped a week of surprise heat.

My skin told me it felt like hell, and our grass crackled as I walked over it. The dashboard thermometer on my car agreed, confirming that the weather was just too hot to be called June.

Then all that energy, packed into the ground by relentless heat, rose thousands of feet into the sky. Waves of it forced air thick with humidity up until they struck high-altitude cold.

There, somewhere above us, that heat converted to lightning, wind and rain. It fell back upon Annapolis with a clash.

The storm landed hard, bringing down trees that crashed into power lines and rooftops. A friend told me he arrived home from vacation to find his house dark. The power didn’t come back on for four days.

The storm, in the way that storms sometimes do, skipped our neighborhood for ones west and north of the city. Don’t hate me.

The longest power outage we’ve experienced at our house was during Isabel, the tropical storm that flooded Annapolis and other Chesapeake towns in September 2003.

It was four days of sweltering heat, followed by an hour of power, then another four days with no electricity. I didn’t even get a chance to shower.

There’s nothing worse than seeing the lights come on a few blocks away and still finding yourself in the dark.

After years of living on the Chesapeake Bay, where the humidity makes the storms grow fat with moisture, we’ve learned to prepare.

Secure anything outside that can be tossed by damaging winds. A summer storm once flung our patio chairs onto the roof.

Keep your gas tank full, a supply of medicines and other essentials handy. Have a buddy system in case you need a place with power to retreat for a shower and some sleep.

Having company this time of year, when everyone asks about a trip to Annapolis, can be a gamble.

My sister-in-law and her boyfriend arrived for a visit the night the storms slammed down. When the next day dawned cooler, breezy, I tried to imagine what it would have been like if the storm had found our house.

Instead, we went to Jimmy Cantler’s Riverside Inn for steamed crabs, the first time this season. It’s a legendary place across the Severn River, run by the extended family of a waterman long retired from pulling up pots on the bay.

We drove down the narrow roads to the restaurant, perched at the end of a peninsula jutting into Mill Creek. None of the streetlights were on, and all the houses were dark.

Did they have sisters-in-law with them?

At Cantler’s, the rumble of generators filled the night, and the sloping parking lot was bright. We walked in and paid a few hundred dollars to pick our dinner from brick red crabs spread out on brown paper.

No wonder Jimmy can afford generators.

That’s one way to be ready. Spend $10,000 or more on a gas-powered lifeline, or maybe a household battery backup.

It will be our turn again for an outage soon. Yet I can’t afford that level of preparedness.

The new balcony solar systems approved for sale in Maryland this year won’t work, either. They cost $1,000 to $5,000 to set up on a sunny corner of your yard, then plug in and save on energy bills.

But when the power grid goes down, they shut off.

So I look longingly at portable power station ads. Small batteries that power a few essentials in a pinch; the good ones start at about $1,000. It goes up as you add capacity or you can add solar panels for days without BGE. There’s no cheap solution except to suffer through.

Heat into storms, money into preparedness. Both are about energy.

That’s what life is, an endless expenditure of energy, changing from one form to the next.

On the Chesapeake Bay, the longest day will pass Sunday, and the slow, sweet slide through July and August begins.

Don’t let the hours of light go to waste, and always keep your eyes on those willow oak leaves. Remember to check the weather app, and finally buy that backup, if you can, before it goes dark again.

Happy solstice.