A morning or two ago between 5 and 6 am and while everyone was catching their last hour of sleep, there was a strange noise on the roof. A bit like rain at first, but then obviously louder. Suddenly there was lightning, thunder, and the persistent white noise of hail hitting the roof.
Hail isn’t a usual occurrance around here (is it anywhere?), especially in late April. Even when it does hail, it usually only does it a little bit and then stops or turns to rain. By the time you actually get outside to see it, it’s usually quite melted and unimpressive. This time the hail lasted for a while, and even accumulated a bit. It was just cold enough outside that it didn’t all melt suddenly, and there was no follow-up rain to wash it away.
The hail storm was exciting and foreboding all at once. Riley was awakened by one of the noises, probably the hail, and came to lay with us in our bed for safety. Abby didn’t even realize it had happened until afterward. Berta and I were awake partly because of the hail, partly because of the squeaking boy. After a while of listening to the hail hit the roof and windows, I just had to take a look outside to see what was going on.
Outside, the storm was in full force. It was a bit windy, and the hail was rapping against the glass of the storm door. It was coming down like crazy, with lightning in the clouds and thunder booming every half minute or so. Every bit of it was frozen - there was no rain at all. This is one thing that makes hail so odd; I was able to stand outside in the reasonably comfortable 50+ degrees and see ice falling from the sky. Cool!
You can see from the photos taken after the storm had stopped that the hail did actually build up. On most of the hard surfaces the hail had melted, but in the mulch it was able to stay cold enough to sit. In the shadow of the house, the sun wasn’t hot enough to melt it. We’re situated strangely so that the front of the house hardly gets any sun, and in the winter the shadow cast by the house causes the snow to stay colder and remain in the lawn longer. Ever since the Fells built the extra floor onto their house next door, we don’t get the benefit of afternoon sun in our yard any more, either.
These are the largest hail stones I’ve ever been able to pick up and hold. I’m sure that they did reduce in size a little bit by the time I got dressed. I put a quarter on the ground there for a size comparison. These things really look like someone filled up buckets of rabbit-pellet-sized ice and dumped it in our yard. If you look closely at this one picture, you can see the hail stones hiding among the grass like late Easter eggs. Crazy stuff.
Weather is pretty amazing. By the time Abby was ready to leave for school, the sky was simply gray and the sun was peeking out.
