Hail, Mary

When the storm first hit late Monday afternoon, I thought, "Oh, look. It's hailing. Lookit the little hailstones bouncing on the ground."

We don't see hail all that often. I thought watching the little ice nuggets bouncing on the ground like frozen jumping beans was kind of interesting.

For about a minute. 

 

Hailstones bounce up onto our porch.

Then the storm picked up momentum. The wind blew a little harder. The stones got larger. They started banging on the roof. They started banging off the storm windows. They started banging around in my head. We were getting pummeled and I'd never seen anything quite like it. I worried about things I never really worried about before: like our cars; like our roof; like the trees in our front yard.

Yikes.

We went outside to the front porch and watched the hailstones bounce off our cars. We don't have a garage, so there was no place to shelter them from the onslaught. We wondered if they were taking damage.

I worried that hailstorms can be precursors to tornadoes, so it could always get worse, you  know. But we never saw funnel clouds.

And then, after about 10 minutes, it was over. Neighbors cautiously seeped out of their houses and began to gather and assess. Leaves from the trees littered the streets and yards. Kim picked up a hailstone off the porch. It was about the size of a golf ball. I took a picture.

The stones were about the size of a golf ball.

What had we just gone through?

The neighbors had collected into little knots of concern and so we moved from car to car for inspection. When we got to ours, yep, there was damage. Kim was crestfallen. She'd never had so much as a scratch on her 12-year-old car. And now this.

We got the insurance wheels in motion and by Thursday morning, an appraiser combed over our cars. Both had taken hits, but the hood of Kim's car, perhaps made of a thinner gauge metal than mine, was as dimpled as a golf ball. (Does that make her car more aerodynamic? Or more prone to hooking and slicing?). The hood will have to be replaced. Paintless dent repair hopefully will take care of the rest of the damage.

A roof assessor came out the next day and took pictures. We have some decisions to make.

One of the assessors had taken a screenshot of the weather map as the storm passed through and he showed it to me. It looked like Lexington was Ground Zero for the barrage. And it felt like my driveway was Ground Zero for Ground Zero.

Extreme weather is becoming more of the norm these days, it seems. Hurricanes are more violent, tornadoes seem more common. We're in an awful heat dome right now. Climate change is real. Nature has a way of issuing warnings. It might be best if we heed them.