Evaporation happens when liquid water becomes water vapor. Because water vapor is lighter than air, it floats up into the atmosphere.

I wouldn’t have heard it if I hadn’t been standing by the exact right window at the exact right time. A far off drumming? A train from the wrong direction? Many, many trucks rumbling? 

The clouds to the northwest were super dark. But my over-reactive phone had only just notified me that some rain would begin in the next ten minutes- and that said rain would be light.

As water vapor floats higher into the atmosphere, it cools with the air around it. Eventually, it cools so much that it condensates- or becomes liquid water droplets again.

These droplets clump together, creating clouds. Depending on atmospheric conditions (air currents, temperature, humidity, etc) droplets may grow big and heavy enough to fall as rain. And some clouds, under the perfect conditions, become huge thunderheads, scientifically known as cumulonimbus clouds.

Standing by the open north-west-most window of my house, I couldn’t identify what I was hearing. I wondered, ‘Is this what a tornado sounded like?’ But surely there was no tornado; the sirens were not blaring and my phone was much too calm. 

That’s when I saw the first hailstones. Bouncing and small. The first in our neighborhood of the spring. So I called to my kids, “Come see the hail, guys!” 

Inside of cumulonimbus clouds- those tall anvil shaped storm clouds you see off in the distance while driving through farm country- air currents form, some going up (updrafts) and some going down (downdrafts). Water droplets can get swept into those drafts. When the liquid droplets are pushed up to the top of the thunderhead, they freeze because the atmosphere way up high is cold. The frozen droplets inevitably fall back down to warmer regions of the cloud where more liquid water sticks to the fresh ice. If it’s caught in an updraft again, blown up to the icy region of the cloud again it will freeze the fresh layer, growing bigger. This cycle of hailstones being blown up and down can happen many times- the stronger a thunderhead’s updrafts, the bigger the storm’s hailstones.

The kids ran to the window just in time to witness a cloud-to-land avalanche of hail. What started as small and relatively innocent hail, quickly grew into huge, quarter-sized hailstones. That was the thing I heard approaching. Millions of quarter-sized ice balls. Tearing leaves. Bouncing on roofs. Bruising branches. Rolling down gutters and crashing into concrete, before they finally piled up in hills like overgrown grains of sand in our freshly planted gardens. 

Before the hailstorm the air was heavy and hot. But after the storm the wind was much cooler and the ghost of winter reaching up from the piles of hailstones was downright cold. The air smelled strongly like vegetation; smashed pine needles, bruised grass, bashed tulips, and punched up leaves. “Plant blood” we called it. My kids ran outside and collected a whole bowl of hailstones that I just finally dumped down the sink yesterday. 

Most thunderstorms create hail. However, most hail melts before it hits the ground.

Our hostas will be scarred until the end of October, holes and rips from a roaring spring hailstorm. I’m not sure that our basket of yellow begonias will ever recover fully, but the half that wasn’t bombarded looks amazing. And it seems that the oak trees, which lost thousands of just-unfurling fuzzy leaves, are somehow full and green again. 

It was power that I heard barreling toward us from the open northwest window of my house that day. The power of water and wind. The power of spring meeting summer. The power of solid ice smashing so much soft botanical life. And today, out that same window, I see that there is strength in being soft and persistent- the yard is deeply green with no hailstones in sight.