The drought has ended (at least for a while)

Rain had been in the forecast almost every day for a week last Saturday but as usual, people either north or south of us got our precipitation and we got bupkis (that’s about the only Yiddish word I know… Thank you, Dick Van Dyke!). We were used to it; my oldest grandson even bought me a fancy gadget to water my garden for Mother’s Day, bless his heart.  In the middle of the afternoon that day, we heard thunder.  No big deal; we’ve heard plenty of meaningless thunder.  It even got loud enough that I decided to get in the house lest I get struck by lightening, and shortly after that, Cliff came in from the shop where he and the grandson had been working on one of his old tractors.

All of a sudden, a downpour hit our trailer house the like of which I haven’t experienced in years:  We were getting rain!  I said, “If this keeps up even for half an hour, we are going to have a lot of rain!”

Then a persistent, unfamiliar noise wafted down through our ceiling, and we looked at one another, confused.  Gabe even lifted his head up from his spot on the couch, with his ears at half-mast, listening with us to the thumping on the roof.  

I said, “Wait a minute… is that hail hitting the roof?  That’s the loudest hail I’ve ever heard!”

I looked out the window, and sure enough.  Hail was hitting the ground, then bouncing upward; it looked like popcorn popping, and must have gone on for at least ten or fifteen minutes.  The little hail-balls I saw were about the size of Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn after it is popped, but the noise above us sounded more like baseballs.  I saw the grandson run to his car and drive it into the shop.  And all that time, the rain was pouring out of the sky.  We live a mile and a half from our town of Wellington; they didn’t get the hail; only rain.  We are about ten miles north of Odessa; in all the time we were having the pouring-down rain, they got bupkis.  (Sorry, but I love that silly word.)  I heard Odessa did get some rain later that night.

When the storm was over, we had two inches in the rain gauge.  Yesterday there was another half inch on top of that.  We have some very light rain now, but it hasn’t amounted to anything, which is fine with me.  There’s a guy coming out to see if we have roof damage; we do have insurance.  Many peaches and apricots were on the ground after the big rain; I think the garden will be OK, although the peas are laying over on the ground and the tomato plants were somewhat injured.  So were the potato vines, but I am confident the potatoes will be alright.  I really couldn’t see that the strawberries were hurt much; most of the berries are still tiny and green.  We had a lot of strawberries yesterday on our cereal, and more on some ice cream later.  However, those were picked before the storm Sunday.

After Cliff gets up, I think we’ll watch The Dick VanDyke Show Episode Season 4, episode 24.

By the way, my computer has a problem; I suspect it’s a virus and am going to have to take it someplace to get it cleaned up and fixed.  Meanwhile, I’m doing this on the iPad, using a keyboard.  It’s not that much different than using a laptop.  Since I needed to take the picture of it with my iPad, that’s the old mini iPad Cliff uses that you see here.  I know there’s some way to get pictures from another device onto mine, or vice versa; I’ve never needed that, so I don’t know how to do it.  All that is sitting on a lap-desk.  I lift it all up and it’s just like a laptop.