It’s been pouring rain on and off for the past few days. I’d hoped that it would clear up enough for me to take care of my lawn. Right now it looks pretty wild out there. It’s ankle deep in places. My house is looking like the ragged, unkempt kid on the block. No more hail though, not like Friday.
Which reminds me, I was going to tell the hail story…
Flash forward from the time of my last long-winded diatribe by about two years. My lease on the upstairs apartment is running out, but that doesn’t matter, because I’ve bought my own house.
My folks are down visiting again. This time they’re not flying off to an exotic locale, instead they’re going to be spending a couple days at my house while the ‘floor guys’ refinish the hardwood that spent the last fifty-odd years out of sight under wall to wall carpeting. My dad’s seen the new place, but my mom hasn’t, so we meet at the apartment and drive to the house with them following me. It’s about a ten minute drive under ordinary circumstances.
It doesn’t take long to see that these weren’t going to be ordinary circumstances. After about two minutes on the road, the sky opens up and it starts to rain. Thunder and lightning are everywhere and the road is hidden under a wash of water. Then there’s a cracking sound and something ricochets off of my windshield. A few seconds later something bounces off the back window. Then there’s a sound like a rack of billiard balls being thrown into an air-driven popcorn popper.
Hailstones the size of quarters begin spanging off of the hood of my car. My windshield wipers are barely able to make a dent in the curtains of rain, and the ice falling from the sky has chilled things so much that a thick fog is starting to develop. I had already slowed to a crawl, and I was about to stop when the front tires hit a huge puddle. It was like a river flowing across the road, and it was spreading. I didn’t want to get stuck there, so I gunned the engine and went plowing on through.
In retrospect, that was a rather silly thing to do. I had no idea how deep the water had gotten, but I managed to make it to non-sumberged pavement on the other side, and the caravan continued. I turned on my radio and caught he end of a National Weather Service warning instructing people to get to shelter. No indications of the nature of the emergency, but I didn’t hear any tornado sirens. Our route took us by some large parking lots and the runoff from them had created the temporary rivers, obscuring the road. There were two of them where the water was above my wheels, and once when I think I felt the car drift sideways a little bit from the flow of the water.
We got to the house safely, with my parents pulling in right behind me. I could see tiny dents in my car from the hail, and I figured that their van had suffered similar damage. I hustled them into the house and said, “Mom, dad, this is my new house, and down here is my new basement. We’ll do the rest of the tour later…”