blue artichoke

Saturday's hailstorm was a mere prelude to Sunday's main event. Blue Grilled Cheese and I had a quiet day, recovering from the cookout and the Apollo Sunshine concert the night before. While sitting on the front porch drinking hard cider, we heard the tornado sirens start up. I turned on the tv and opened the windows so we could hear the weather forecast on the porch and we watched the dark clouds roll in, the temperature drop, the rain start, the sky turn dark and green, the cloud rotation pick up and the 80 mph wind start to sound like a fast-approaching train. That's a tornado, folks! The rain turned to small, mothball-size hail, then to bigger hail that would smash to pieces when it hit the ground. It got quiet and eerily bright. We thought about going inside, but stayed on the porch or in the street, watching the clouds twist and whirl. No tornados formed in our area, but the high winds caused damage elsewhere in Missouri. After things settled back down, we went inside for dinner. Blue Grilled Cheese made her famous meatloaf and her grandmother's fried okra. I opened a box of onion rings. Another hailstorm with tornado warnings swept across mid-MO later that night, splitting apart and straddling Columbia to the north and south, moving east. The hail woke me up in the wee hours, but other than a few dings on the cars, the Blue Artichoke household weathered the storm like a champ.

The next day (Monday, aka yesterday), Blue Grilled Cheese and I dropped off my car to have the open window fixed (a drop cloth wrapped around the door and taped to the window protected it from the storms). We then took Gentleman Caller's car to St. Louis where we drove around Forest Park and wandered around University City. On the way home, we found a Trader Joe's, Whole Foods and World Market. I never knew such wonderful stores were so close! This might be dangerous; I already started restocking my now empty cabinets with delights that I'll hold on to for some special occasion, or the next great purge. We got Mexican take out for dinner, drank a four-pack of granny smith cider and another bottle of wine and wrote tipsy poems for our ongoing coffee table book of poems.

Today, we went back to Kansas City, where we saw no fountains and I left Blue Grilled Cheese at the airport. She left her chap stick tucked into my car window. And that is the end of Spring Break Missouri 2006! sigh.