Ahhhhh, Fall...

I am torn as to which is my favorite season, it’s a tossup between fall and winter.

Here in Texas, I’ve leaned toward fall, simply because it and spring are the seasons where you can actually see sustained and distinct seasonal change.

Summer is just plain freaking hot, and winter is a crap shoot, but as fall rolls through, you can feel the crisp mornings, watch the leaves change and know that stuff is happening…

It’s also the second growth season for goodies, a benefit of the relatively mild climate here. Spring is basically storm season, and that can and does trump growth when it feels like it. Tomatoes and peppers and herbs don’t take kindly to having the snot knocked out of them by hail, and neither do our trees.

Where we live, west of Fort Worth, is the place during Storm Season where big nasty storms roll in from the west. If you watch the radar, you see deep red commonly, and even pink, purple and white headed right toward us. The colors represent dBZ, or “A non-dimensional unit of radar reflectivity which represents a logarithmic power ratio (in decibels, or dB) with respect to radar reflectivity factor, Z; the Z is best expressed in the ratio Z/R, or “An empirical relationship between radar reflectivity factor z (in mm^6 / m^3 ) and rain rate ( in mm / hr ):” All that aside, if you ever watch the weather radar and live in tornado alley, colors like deep red, pink, purple, and white are very, very, very bad; they mean that deep shit is headed your way and regardless of how that manifests, it’s going to be an ugly ride…

In all the years we’ve lived here, every single storm that looked like that has waited until it was dang near on top of us and then split neatly into and roared off northeast and southwest, leaving us fine and dandy and knocking the crap out of those less fortunate: But not last April… That storm came on and roared dead overhead, packing maximum hail of roughly baseball size, common hail of ping pong ball size, and winds in excess of 80 mph. Now ping bong balls falling from the heavens wouldn’t hurt ya, and might even be kinda cool; ping pong ball sized hail might crack your skull and is definitely not cool. I have been out in storms in the mogollons at 9000 feet, and all over the western US, but I have never been through anything inside a structure like that storm. I thought the house was coming down, ‘cause it sounded that way, but it wasn’t that bad.

After it passed, hail lay several inches deep and the roads ran like rivers. Our trees and plants got the shit knocked out of ‘em, as did our roof, greenhouse, shed, cars, and grill. An insurance claim later, all that was settled, but the plants didn’t forget…

And it took ‘em until fall to catch their stride, but boy did they; we’ve been blessed with incredible crops of tomatoes and peppers, “Pretty enough for a Burpee catalog,” according to mom. The trees had bit harder time, but they’ll be OK by next year and the only recollection of that storm will be a skinny growth ring many years down the pike.