Welcome to Spring

“April Showers bring May Flowers”

While I was posting the previous entry, the tiny piece of sky I can see between the buildings, out my third floor window, turned black. Rain begin to fall. I got up to look out, only to see large debris flying at my head. Other pieces were whipping past my window. “Should I take cover?” I briefly thought. “Or should I go find a bigger window to see what’s going on?” I opted for the bigger window. This was my second storm of the day.

Over my lunch break I headed west to Middleton on a baklava delivery run to my parent’s house. The drive west was a drive from partly sunny into pitch black. As I turned north the clouds directly ahead of me were black, with green behind and a rolling, frothy white front-end. I’ve seen tornados form and drop out of the sky and to me it looked as if I was driving right into a baby tornado.

The frothy clouds were moving fast, descending and swirling. I pulled into my parents house, ran inside and made them come out and look. As we stood there the tornado warning sirens started to sound.

Inside we turned on the news and saw the red cell a little to our north, headed towards Waunakee, (the next town up). It started to rain and then hail. Not little hail but marble to 1 inch in diameter hail, coming down thick and hard. We stood in the breezeway and watched. It began raining harder.

Their sidewalk, driveway and yard filled with water. We watched the radar as a second storm cell came in. More rain, more giant hail. It sounded like someone hammering the roof. Out their front windows, the lake steamed, still covered in ice. Clouds of vapor, moving in the opposite direction to the sky clouds, rolled onto shore, enveloping the houses west of us.

Ten minutes later the rain had stopped, the temperature had dropped about 15 degrees and things seemed stablized. I tiptoed through the water to my car and drove back to work. Blocks away from the office the streets became bone dry. Seven miles away it hadn’t rained a drop. Until now.

**Note: While the tornado was fully formed, it never touched down. Good news for all.