Gloria

January 22, 2020…

This morning I awoke early, still dark at 730 am, to the wonderful sound of rain on the patio outside. But then I thought, wait, I have my earplugs in. So I removed them and that sweet tinkle became the sound of shrapnel hitting the tile floor outside. Gloria had arrived.

For those who care about these things, Winter Storm Gloria began over North Africa, and eventually merged with a cold front from Scandinavia, bringing high winds and rain to the Eastern Mediterranean coast of Spain and into France. Edges of the storm carried Saharan sand as far as the French Riviera.

So back to me: I turned on the patio light to see that we were being pelted with Garbanzo sized hail stones and it didn’t let up like it does in Santa Fe after a couple of minutes. It started piling up into drifts. Later, out on the plazas, areas were piled 6 inches deep with hail and trees were denuded of oranges. Things are calmer now, but rain is predicted for the next few days, which I enjoy, being someone who lives in a perpetual drought zone in New Mexico. Malagueños don’t seem so enchanted. This kind of weather is very unusual. Plenty of funny memes have appeared on local social media.