10 scary minutes

Last Friday, just about dinner time, we had a freakish thunder-rain-wind-and hail-storm. Several branches came down in our front yard, and a house across the street lost a really big limb from one of their pecan trees. Neighbors elsewhere in our area were hit much harder, with whole trees downed. We ended up being lucky with our power outage, too—ours came back on around 3:30 the next morning (after being out for 9 hours). Some folks had to wait much longer.

I happened to be looking out our front window when a couple of our cedar elm branches came down. Probably not the best place to be standing, but I was transfixed by the display.

In addition to the swirling winds that brought down the branches, there was heavy rain. Our street often turns into an impressive river when it rains, but the downed vegetation was an addition this time...

...and of course there was hail, larger than I'd seen in some time, probably about nickel- to quarter-sized...

Here's what our driveway looked like after the hail stopped. Those leaves came down with the hail, I imagine...

The crazy thing is that all this fury was over in 10 minutes, max. Then, as you can see above, the sun even came out!

So it was easy for all the neighborhood to come out and observe the damage (none terribly severe on our street), help each other pick up and clear brush and branches, and just generally have the kind of "block party" we don't usually have the time or inclination for. When everyone's A/C is out though, it makes sense to congregate outside, and that was a pleasant by-product of our blessedly brief demonstration of nature's fury.