The weather dreamers were right this time

I can’t bitch about the weather this week. In my last post, Saturday morning, the weather dreamers had forecast rain and possible thunderstorms. All the thunderstorms in Southern California are “isolated,” so you have to be near that isolation to notice any effect. At noon on Saturday an isolated thunderstorm approached from the southwest and found our house. We had rain, lightning, thunder and hail. I turned the rocker around toward the windows and watched it for almost an hour.

It was not a thunderstorm in the biblical sense. Coincidentally, on Saturday, both my children, Jessie and Tyler, were in San Diego, not at our house, but close enough (Jamul) to share this storm and possibly comment on it. When they were little, we were together on a visit to Abilene when they encountered, and remember, the kind of thunderstorm that I admire. It was summertime, a perfectly still day with stunning humidity. They were at my grandmother’s house, and I was watching my uncle play in a golf tournament.

At about 2:30, north of us, thunderheads shot into the sky as if launched from the earth. By 3, the base of those clouds was black and reached to the ground. I judged I had maybe 15 minutes to get home before it hit. I was a couple of minutes late. Our block was a black box shaking with thunder, lightning, rain and wind when I piled through the screen door onto the porch. I yelled to Jessie and Tyler to come out to the porch and watch. But they were inside, on the floor behind the couch. Trying to crawl UNDER the couch.

By comparison, the storm on Saturday was a polite cough. But still it set a record for me as a Californian. Never in 35 years’ residency here had I been in a storm that lasted an hour. The lightning, all cloud-to-cloud, stayed directly overhead and gave instant thunder. It HAILED. Nothing you would report to the paper. “BB-sized hail pummels La Mesa residence.” The pellets were tiny and jumped in a darting fashion, like ice fleas, as they hit the ground. It was hail, all the same. I have pictures, and I will post them when I get a minute. I am writing this from my office at school.

Jessie and Tyler were here on a sad weekend, after the death of their stepfather. He was a builder, and loved the outdoors, and the avocado groves he brought to life on the slopes below their house. I hope the storm brought significance to his family and their memories and stories of him. I know it was ironic that Jessie and Tyler should be close, all these years after that Abilene afternoon, at the time a storm set a record for me in San Diego.