Hail, No!

We really need rain here, and I’ve been fanatically tuning in to the local TV weather forecast each morning and evening and repeatedly clicking the Wunderground.com radar looking for those sifting patterns of red and yellow. This evening, we got rain. Driving, pounding, blowing rain. Crashing thunder, crackling lightening. I even lost my satellite signal, so you know that means Something Ominous is happening.

Within minutes, the streets were a river and my yard was full of puddles and the gutters spilled over. Glorious rain! And that was immediately followed by little pearl white beads of hail. Noooooo!!! My newly planted, delicate shrubs!! I must save them!! Certainly they were going to be shredded and I could do nothing but watch helplessly as my back-breaking work and hard-earned money became one with the mulch. (By the way, I am never melodramatic. Seriously.) Well, as it turns out, the little hail beads were rather, um, harmless. And the rain quickly shifted its path of destruction farther east. I ran out to my rain gauge, eager to see the marker at one or two inches. Instead, the rain level had barely stretched to a meager one-third of an inch. How pathetically sad.

As it turns out, the only big drama of the night was when my friend Sue sheepishly knocked on my door at the ungodly hour of 9:30 p.m., tweezers in hand, to ask me to remove a tick from her scalp. Ah, spring.

Here are a couple of pictures from my gardens this morning.

Flowering Merry Berry Holly


Tulips