It has been an extraordinarily dry year. The normal spring rains never showed and the summer has been typically dry and hot. There's a palpable aura of depression outdoors...the grass is withered and dusty...the ground is developing enormous cracks...the battle to keep a yard and 3 gardens alive seems all but lost.
Until this evening. A half hour before the storm hit, I walked to the mailbox by the road and knew something was up. The wind was very high from the west; I glanced to the east and saw the deep blue associated with thunderstorms. The building supercell was pulling the oven-baked air into it with great gulps...and growing larger.
The storm hit hard, with wind-whipped horizontal sheets of rain. There was a bit of a different sound to it; we NEVER get storms from the east, and this one was blasting my house in a whole new way, triggering noises I hadn't heard before. I was talking to Blake on the phone while looking out the window when a flying saucer went by - actually it was a neighbor's trampoline and now it was at least 20 feet in the air and rising. It eventually was slammed to ground upside down 150 feet away.
So this was the day things evened out a bit. All summer I've watched neighboring communities get rain while we were being broiled to a crisp. And I'll pay the price with extended hours mowing the rejuvenated grass. Oh, well.
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Postscript: We drove by a cornfield about a half-mile from our place today. The corn had long since succumbed to the heat and was quite dead. But the storm I described must have had a microburst feature, because all the corn was bent over and flattened to the ground...and all pointed west. It was like a westbound paint-roller from heaven had swept in and had its way. Amazing.
Tim
Postscript: We drove by a cornfield about a half-mile from our place today. The corn had long since succumbed to the heat and was quite dead. But the storm I described must have had a microburst feature, because all the corn was bent over and flattened to the ground...and all pointed west. It was like a westbound paint-roller from heaven had swept in and had its way. Amazing.
Tim
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