Driving home, Wednesday, Lynn gets a call from a friend.
 
"Lynn! There's a tornado advisory out here! Hail the size of golf balls! Coming directly at us over the lake! Are you home?"
 
"On our way, yes, " calmed Lynn, "We just picked up a bunch of new plants from the Natural Gardener in Austin."
 
Two avocado trees, two butterfly bushes, two aloe vera plants, a few more tomato starts (there is no such thing as too many tomatoes and still room in the garden),  zucchini, rosemary, mint, cantaloupe, watermelon.
 
Ten minutes later we drove straight down to the garden and unloaded everything. Lynn, wisely, suggested we sequester everything away. I said, "Into the shed".
 
It helped. A little bit.
 
We moved the cars deep under the carport as 3:30 daylight lessened, as the heat turned its knob to High. The sky couldn't breath. Thickly quiet, everything. 
 
Even the dogs. We let all five in to cower behind the couches, safe they thought, not quite.
 
Pop. 
 
Thonk. 
 
Plat. 
 
Plat-thonk. Plat-pop. 
 
Pot. Loud "T". Thonk. 
 
Whack. Smack. Plat-THONK, PLAT-POP. THONK. THONK. Crash! Blast! Rip! Smash! BREAK! Screaming now, whirlwind, freezing torment, LOUD! IMPOSSIBLE!
 
Louder and faster and darker and harder, tornado, mindless, fury, unleashed.
 
Hell, hurried.
 
And spent itself.
 
Smack whack. Plant thonk, pop plant, thonk ... thonk ... thonk, plattery plat, thonk, plat.
 
Over.
 
And quiet again, a careful quiet. Unreal feeling. Tense, present. Looking out over the yard to the garden.
 
The garden!
 
A Spring sprung winter covers everything, not white but ice, snowflakes are golf balls, misshapen, hard, laughing.
 
Steam rising. 
 
The sun, already out, begins the melting. Not all the hail will be gone, hiding in shadow corners, until tomorrow.
 
The nightmare was a short one. It is over. It is done. We pray.
 
I would shout now but my wind is as spent as the storm in the middle of March.
 
We put on our blue ponchos, solemn funeral dressing, grind open the sliding glass door, window to the instant-in-slow-motion movie, to madness, muck.
 
Stuck. The insanity crunches under our feet, walking. Sleep walking. Still a dream.
 
Hail slithers under our feet. It is everywhere. Thick blanket, rumpled and folded high against anything daring to defy. 
 
Check the house. Windows broken. No, there are no windows. Screens and sashes and the semblance of protection, gone. Ninety seconds! Wind driven, solid ice anger.
 
The green tractor's thick plastic hood, swiss cheese.  Molding, cracked. Emergency lights blinking, the seat pummeled into thick yellow pieces of sponge cake, wet.
 
Fourteen trees planted only last weekend, an orchard, our orchard, aborted. Pregnant plumb, pregnant peach, pregnant apricot, pear. Gone. No blossoms. No lemons or grapefruit or oranges this year. Some limbs, severed, bark stripped, bleeding.
 
Five hundred growing things, squash, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, chard, jalapeño, pimento, red and yellow and green sweet bells, peppers by every name and strawberries and thyme and rosemary and sage. Nothing but maybe a few stems and one half of a leaf or two, broken.
 
Hiroshima.
 
I don't like looking at pictures of Hiroshima.
 
Ninety seconds undoes ninety hours, times three. It's mathematical, statistical, impossible reality. All the work, the sweat, the investment, the promise! 
 
"But faith is like a mustard seed", a Sunday School parable marbled, my mouth now to filled with non-Sunday School thinking.
 
Lynn went out and cursed God that night. I stayed in and wondered if I had the voice to curse God.
 
Neither mattered the next day.
 
A neighbor wandered over, old Texas wisdom. 
 
"Back in nineteen hundred ninety nine, had one hell of a goddamn hail storm. Worse than this 'un. Ripped things up like this one. Didn't have a garden back then so it didn't matter as much. My garden's pretty ripped up too. You' can count on them storms 'bout every ten years or so, so I guess we were due one. You all have a nice, pretty garden here. Don't worry 'bout things. All that'll come back, good as new, cept' them lemons and plumbs and them peaches and 'cots. Gonna have to wait a 'nother year maybe for that. Most this'll come back though, with a vengeance I'm telling ya', taller, stronger. Yep, mighty pretty garden you have here."
 
Mustard seeds and mountains.
 
Blisters and blessings.
 
Having faith the five hundred seeds planted this Saturday and Sunday by two kneeling gardeners, wife and husband, would soon push up through the dirt into the song of the Mocking Bird.