Marble-Sized.

Well.


The above came through at about 6 pm and rained and blew like all apocalyptic hell and then it hailed for twenty minutes — twenty full minutes — and shredded our tomatoes. Begonias destroyed, Dusty Miller (which was in the corsages and boutonnieres at last year's fancy wedding) destroyed, hostas damaged in a way that will almost have to linger. The lettuce is in exceedingly bad shape — we'll know more tomorrow. But no limbs down, no holes in the roof, no trees damaged for all of ever. And alongside all the damage it dropped down on us, it was surely beautiful in its own way.


It comes to this: I'm proud as hell for the knee and the dog to have been right — it didn't rain in Winston, and it didn't rain much in Burlington, surely not the inch and a half we got here — but all that glib satisfaction comes with seriously busted tomatoes and leaves and wee branches down everywhere, everywhere. I've never seen hail like that — not even in 30328, where I did the bulk of my growing up. We're going to go with marble, penny and nickel for our measurements here, but the elegant thing about hail is the following NOAA measurement scale — if it's round, friends and fans, it corresponds to a hail size. Head of a nail, spilled amount of olive oil. That's what we had alongside subway token and thumbnail and shirt button.


Cool on the back side of this thing. More tomorrow, maybe, though the knee and the dog don't quite guarantee in the same way. What the numbers say: On this last day of May, we made up, exactly, what had looked like a serious monthly rainfall deficit. Maybe that'll carry our broken, broken food crops through. I won't even say what the radishes look like. But that hail was something to see. It rained here. I'm not sure it rained much of anywhere else, but it sure as hell rained here. Four inches for the month. Dead damn on our average. The cleanup starts tomorrow, first day of the new month. In the morning, we'll see what else is harmed.