Your appreciation of storms with lightning and thunder (so long as they are not directly on top of me..:) is one I share!
Illustrating the contrast in perception and attitude, I hark back to when I was living in Chincoteagie, Virginia - home of Misty, the Chincoteague Pony.
It is literally an island, 2 by 7 miles long in size, and was first populated by English settlers. They had been mostly uneducated ones, full of extreme superstitions, passed down through the generations.
Then a Navy wife with a baby and expecting my second son, I lived in a large house built right on Main Street across from the bay, built by a sea captain.
It had been divided in half, through the center of the two stories, and the other half was occupied by a local family with two grade school children.
Their mother was positively aghast (and fussed at me for it) that in my last few months of pregnancy, I actually *hung my laundry to dry outside on a clothesline* - certain that reaching up over my head would ensure the umbilical cord would wrap around my baby's neck.
She also had steeped into her children *Stark Terror* where storms were concerned. At the first sign of one, they fled home and actually cowered under their beds.
In contrast, when two of my very young grandchildren lived with us for a few years in our house in the woods in North Carolina, I early on "defused" the impact of storms.
I gave them a simple explanation their little minds could grasp, telling them, "Oh! God is moving around the furniture in heaven again! Let's go to the sliding doors to the deck and watch the show when the lightning comes!!"
They thus scurried to that vantage point and would applaud each bolt and thunder clap with me with enthusiasm..:))
It was conveyed not to go out, and that it could be harmful, but there was no active *fear.*
As for your saying you loved to view it from afar, we often had that opportunity living just a few hours from the Blue Ridge Parkway.
One of the most magnificent storms I ever watched was from an overlook, with some homes very far below looking like a child's miniature toy village.
Halfway between our heights and them, a heavy, black-clouded storm passed from left stage to right, flinging jagged bolts indiscriminately and emitting thunder that reverberated strongly against the mountains.
Awesome Power!!
I grew up living in "the hollow between two hilltops" in Vernon NJ, and when thunderstorms rolled through, it'd echo and reverb through the hollow.
Our house would shake and rattle from it, as did the neighbors houses.
Garn, gotta run some errand.
Be back in a minute.