This article is a redraft of the very first article I'd posted on this blog seven years ago. Hope y'all enjoy it!
Peace.
Solitude.
A delightful spring afternoon. The glass window overlooking the city presented the usual - the old blanket of haze across the horizon, the occasional bird on the lookout for lunch, the distant rumble of the highway, and partly cloudy skies.
Tranquility.
Upon completing my inspection of the city and diagnosing it with excellent health, I believe I proceeded with my day, doing this and that. There’s a decent chance that I sat down to draw a multicellular organism, likely a pigeon, for my biology homework.
This afternoon surely isn’t a recent one, as I believe my city wouldn’t have received an ‘excellent health’ diagnosis from me on any of the afternoons over the past two years of our two-week lockdown.
I’d just given my pigeon wings when an all-too-familiar wooo made itself heard. The balcony door was slightly ajar, and the breeze succeeded at pulling off a flawless impression of a lost soul, whistling through the narrow gap between the door and the frame. A welcome change to the windless afternoon. I got up to meet the breeze, perhaps with the intention of asking it to help my pigeon fly.
I opened the door and walked straight into a wall of dust.
This was no breeze. Not just my pigeon, in all practicality, I could’ve gained flight had I stepped further into the balcony. I promptly closed the door and sprinted around the house, closing all doors and windows I could find.
This absolute hurricane of a wind no longer needed gaps between doors and frames for making its presence known. Plants and trees rustled at full capacity, clenching the ground with their roots for dear life. About a minute later, raindrops started slamming against the windows. A minute earlier, we were talking tranquility and meditation.
Upon securing the perimeter of the house, I proceeded to the window overlooking the city.
It would be a ludicrous understatement to say that the window presented a sight to behold.
Some fifty feet away, I saw something that I can only describe as a giant walking whirlpool. The air and rain swirled in perfect unison, forming a portal connecting the ground to the massive raincloud above. And anything that could be airborne, was airborne. Leaves, twigs, dirt, branches, clothes, plastic bags, the tin roof of the compost shed, all of these effortlessly entered the portal, reached the cloud, and rained back down.
The rain really started to pick up. The wind wasn’t far behind, and was in fact, in the lead. It was no longer raining down. For a solid half-minute, droplets of water appeared to be moving up, back towards the cloud.
In the middle of this clement weather, a distinctive hoy resounded through the environment. I saw a small group of people run and take shelter under an adjacent building. The exclamation felt a little out of place. These storm chasers had managed to keep their feet on the ground despite the initial gust, the water tornado, and the cloudburst-enhanced version of the latter. Why the sudden run for the hills?
At this point, something banged against the window. A few more of these somethings crashed against the glass pane. Clack. Thud. Bang. I couldn’t immediately figure out the identity of these little things bombarding the window. A few of these accumulated on the window sill.
Smaller than marbles, these pearly white spheroids were perhaps what raindrops yearned to become. I’d never seen a hailstorm before, so it took me a while to arrive at the conclusion that these mini cannonballs from the stratosphere were, as a matter of fact, hailstones.
A terrific boom of thunder served as the perfect beat drop on The Hailstones’ newest single.
I don’t think my brain’s imagination department could possibly conjure up a more spectacular scene. Hailstones and raindrops were being flung in all directions. Leaves, tin roofs, clothes, and bags were being scattered all over. A brilliant flash of lightning illuminated everything in sight. It was like peering through a kaleidoscope, only one that was much larger and more vivid. Scintillating pieces of ice, along with gleaming drops of rain, in harmony with various components of the surroundings, continued swishing around in the natural lightning-powered tornado mixer.
And just like how the once-vivacious elderly slowly transition into their twilight years, the storm gradually transformed into a normal thundershower. It wasn't long before the city regained its original state of serenity. The earthy after-rain smell wafted through the neighborhood. The drab colors of the sun-dried city were now replaced by deeper, brighter hues. Even the horizon's haze blanket seemed to have dissipated, revealing a bluer sky. I collected the hailstones from the window sill and watched as they melted into oblivion.