Hailstorm in Auckland and thoughts of my Grandpa.

The polar blast caused freezing temperature and snow in the South. It was hailing when I was driving home. When it hails, I always think of my Grandpa.

This is snow in New Zealand at Mt Raupehu, not in Auckland.






Hail stones have an intriguing effect on me.

My Grandpa left China about 100 years ago to Tropical Borneo when he was 20. When he was 81, and I was 18, there was a freak hail storm.

The hailstorm made a lot sound as the frozen ice pebbles pelted down our roof.







Our house was on stilts. "Snow! Snow!" we yelled and we all rushed downstairs.

Grandpa in his 80s, and all of six of us aged 3 to 18. ( The Chinese believe that you should not go out in the rain or you will catch a cold.) We laughed and picked the hail, the marble size hail. We twirled and danced and laughed in the slushy rain. Grandpa cried, he had left his temperate China, never returned and thought he would never, ever see this natural phenomenon again. Sixty years had past, and God sent few minutes of ecstasy. We told Grandpa, "You can die now."

My big sis Rose stared out of the window, and thought we had gone mad. When Grandpa died 3 years later, I was in Canada experiencing the coldest winter Canada ever had, minus 28 degrees. I looked out of my window, at the falling snow and                                                              
whispered, Grandpa, you are now be back at your homeland China. Go and play with the snow, real snow, not hail.

Whenever we have hail, I want to go outside and relive that incredible time
again. My grandpa, my siblings and me.

This Christmas Day in the summer in Melbourne, Australia, hailstones as big as tennis ball pelted down. I thought of my cousins Kim and Abbie who live in Melbourne. I dedicate this posr to them and to all my other cousins whom I found in Facebook
this year. Most of these cousins I have not even seen because I had left Borneo before they were born. May this episode give them a warm fuzzy feeling of a grandpa they never knew as he had died before they were born.


                                                               These are simulated photos, I went to my freezer and snapped                 icicles growing in it.

I broke the icicles and imagined the day when I was with Grandpa, holding the hail stone in my palm.

   











*This story is perhaps dramatic only to children growing in a tropical climate*


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