Ice Sage

We were driving through a neighborhood yesterday and Debbie observed a lone Desert Willow that – as she put it – was “blooming up a storm.” Most of them aren’t blooming yet, and so my response about the over-achiever was that it would be sorry when it froze. OK, so it wasn’t that funny…but it was prescient, sort of.

Last night around 11:00 a line of thunderstorms rolled across our area, dumping some brief heavy rain, along with small but fierce hail. When Debbie retrieved the newspaper at 5:30 this morning (we also have an over-achieving paper carrier), she found this scene in our flowerbed:

Despite morning temperatures in the mid-50s, these little flowers were still packed in ice from the hailstorm. Besides being beaten, there’s a good chance they won’t survive the chill, although our hope is that the ground temperature didn’t drop to a killing degree.

[Fortunately, this appears to be the worst damage we sustained from the hail, and this occurred only because the icy balls rolled off the roof and accumulated in one unfortunate spot.]

“It will be a cold day in July before…” is a common aphorism around here, but perhaps we should start referring to ice storms in May.