When the sky puts on a show

The celestial extravaganza began simply enough.

I was already past Hutchinson on the last Saturday of the Kansas State Fair, heading west to the family farm, when I saw the first white, puffy clouds forming in the pristine azure skies. No two were alike, and I marveled at their distinctions.

Countless generations of children have looked up at such clouds and said "That looks like...." But how many adults take a moment from their busy days to do the same thing? Not enough, I dare say.

Off to the left, one cloud shot up higher than the rest, as if it were an eager student in a classroom raising its hand in an attempt to catch the teacher's attention. "Pick me! Pick me!"

Off in the distance, I saw a deep blue shaft stretching from a dark gray cloud to the ground. I recognized it was a rain shaft. Some portion of Stafford County was receiving a welcome, late-summer shower.

To the north, beams of sunlight pushed through breaks in the gathered clouds. I thought of all the stories and paintings that depicted God shining His love and favor on humanity as a ray of light from the heavens. And no wonder: There's something undeniably majestic and moving about it.

A short time later, I looked back south for the rain shaft. Not only had it stopped raining, the clouds had disappeared as well. It was a classic "popcorn thunderstorm" - fire up in the muggy afternoon heat, produce a brief, intense shower, and then collapse.

It had all happened within the span of 90 minutes.

Shakespeare wrote that all the world's a stage.

In Kansas, we're often reminded the sky can be, too.

A hail of a storm

Windows are shattered in the bedrooms. The screens have been shredded. So much hail had piled up on the balcony in a matter of minutes that it looked like it had snowed. The hail stones pounded the roof of my apartment building so intensely I had to shout to be heard on the phone.

And that wasn't even the worst of the storm that blew up in the atmosphere Wednesday night and savaged sections of Wichita. Hail the size of baseballs struck downtown and in neighborhoods around the city.

There's something poetic about baseball-sized hail falling at the baseball stadium...unless it was your vehicle that had its windows crushed by the onslaught.

My car took a pounding in its own right. My front windshield has a handful of cracks, which spent a steamy Thursday lengthening. I'm going to have to replace the windshield...and I may have to replace the car.