A Storm to Remember

A Storm to Remember

The storm came without warning. Hubby and I sat in the living room, when suddenly I said, “The sky sure is getting dark. And the wind…”

We walked to the front door, cautiously opened it to walk onto the porch. A storm was brewing, the trees were bending a bit, leaves scurrying about. The sky continued to darken. We ran back inside to the safety of our home.

Lightening, then thunder soon began. Rain, and it began. Hail. Small at first.

I ran to the back door to check out our backyard. The sound of the hail so loud I had to scream for hubby to come look.

Swirls of hail, lightning flashes, crashes of thunder, wind blowing rain sideways, we watched in amazement. Hail bounced off the ground, flew into the door, the windows. Rain blew forward, upside down and backward it seemed. But as we stood, paralyzed by our inability to do anything to stop the destruction, we watched as hail first started to accumulate.

The hail was pea-sized. Lightning and thunder continued. Then the hail was quarter-size. Wind drove the hail in swirling clouds. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. The hail was now golf-ball size. But still the hail swirled about. We could now hear it hitting the garage, the house windows and doors. Hail covered the ground, just like snow.

When the hail reached softball-size, the sound was as if bombs were being dropped on us. The wind continued to howl, the hail blew about in whirling clouds. The rain fell, the trees were bending, their leaves being shredded with the huge hail balls falling. Lightning and thunder continued overhead. Hail bounced off the glass door we stood before.

Suddenly I heard the first sound inside. A crack. Then another. I raced from the back door to the kitchen. We have skylights in our kitchen. The one by the refrigerator had a crack.

“Oh no! Come quick! What do we do?” I yelled at hubby. We looked up in horror.

“Nothing, we can’t do anything. Just watch. And stay away.”

So we watched in horrid anticipation as a small crack enlarged to a spider-web of smaller cracks. Then suddenly, with a large “whomp", the entire window fell into the kitchen. It fell against the refrigerator, on the counter, on the microwave then on the floor.

Glass pieces scattered everywhere and now hail and rain and leaves were coming into the kitchen. Our skylight had disintegrated from hail pounding it. But just one skylight. The other was still intact.

Outside the storm moved on. It left behind downed tree limbs, tree and bush leaves shredded all over, our house siding damaged, our roof damaged, our garage damaged, and our skylight destroyed. We’d left the Jeep outside that day because of remodeling supplies in the garage. So our Jeep was also dented, a mirror gone, but no windshield broken.

All over our town, every house had some kind of storm damage. Windows, roofs, siding were all damaged, especially on the north-facing side. People’s cars were dented and glass broken. The town looked as if a tornado had gone through. The weatherman stated that if the storm had been any stronger it would have been a tornado, the winds were that strong and the barometer was that low.

But the real damage came later. Insurance companies and repair companies descended like hordes of insects. Some got damage repaired without incident, like us. But some are still fighting to get repairs done, now three years later.

I am still cleaning up glass pieces. Occasionally I’ll find them. Little reminders of that horrible storm in May 2018.


W/C 619