Late this afternoon, I sat at my green glass desk and watched the sky growing darker, the clouds pregnant with rain, and the trees blowing back and forth in the wind. I wanted music to match the weather, and the mood of the writing I’d planned to do, and settled on Loreena McKennitt’s Book of Secrets, a long-time favorite of mine, and I was lost in listening to “The Highwayman” when the eerie keening sound began.

As we’d watched Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, my first thought was “Air Raid,” and when I looked out the front window, I was half convinced I would see vintage planes in a dogfight over suburbia.

Instead, I saw rain, and then the phone rang – Fuzzy calling me to tell me to expect hail. I turned on the television to see a tornado warning (just south of us, at that time), went to the back yard to cover the glass picnic table with a thick blanket, because hail and glass really shouldn’t come into direct contact with each other.

And then the storm came, dropping pea- and marble-sized bits of ice all over the yard, and down the chimney (the latter made a clanging sound that caused much dog barkage), and rain. It was over too soon, and we had sun for several minutes, before the sky turned grey again.

I didn’t get any writing done, but I got to watch hail.
It’s all good.