{this was really fun to eat}
photos taken March 25, 2009

For the curious: These darling oddities came from the sky. A reader shed scientific light on the subject when he sent me this email:

“I’m a meteorologist whose interests include how ice precipitation is formed in clouds. It turns out that what you’ve got is a very heavy shower of graupel. Graupel is a fancy name for the particle that forms when supercooled water droplets collect on an ice or snow crystal (riming) until the crystal is completely hidden. I’ve never seen such a heavy fall of graupel at the surface, but graupel is quite common inside summer rainclouds.”