TORNADO ALLEY

I know these photos are over a  month late, but I still thought I should post them and tell you the story of the day a massive tornado hit our area.
    It happened on a Saturday sometime after four. We had just gotten home from somewhere; I can’t recall where. It began getting dark outside and windy and overall gloomy, just like it always does before a rainstorm. Except we had this eerie feeling it was more than just a regular rainstorm, so we turned on the weather channel. It was like something out of a movie. There, on our TV screen, was live feed of a tornado touching down and literally eating downtown, about 25 minutes south of us. The station, not our TV, kept going to black about every two minutes as the weatherman  screamed “Oh my god! It’s….”
Black screen, no sound.
 Back on.
 Back off.
Back on long enough to hear “It’s heading towards…
in about seven minutes”
My husband’s eyes got big as he directed our daughter to put the dogs in their crates and clear out the floor of a hall closet. This was it. A tornado was heading to our suburban town. Our state is known for getting whacked by hurricanes. I’ve lived through some big ones here. But never a tornado. I dusted off our flashlights once I found them. My daughter put on her bike helmet “just in case”. We filled up a couple jugs of water and grabbed some thick blankets and did all those other odd things that you’re supposed to do in an emergency. And an emergency this was. The calm before the storm had my daughter and I huddling in the closet with my husband standing at the window.
A long silence.
Then…
“It’s HERE!” He dives into the closet with us like it’s third base. The tornado skirts down our road. It indeed sounds like the proverbial train. My ears pop. The whole ordeal lasts less than two minutes. We opened the front door to assess the damage. The air was thick with the smell of pine sap and the rain was still coming down in sheets. But the actual tornado had lifted and dissipated, so my husband helped neighbors pull a large tree out of the street. Two doors down, a tree was laying on its side in a living room. We had no water or electricity for about 15 hours, so we spent that night at a friend’s house 30 minutes away who got no damage. I had a very large glass of wine that night, said a prayer of thanks and relief, hugged my daughter tight, and went to bed before ten completely exhausted from stress.
      The next morning our friends had hot coffee ready for us and we all sat on the couch in our PJs watching TV. News reports and videos were flooding the news station from around the whole state. The city was a wreck! I was anxious to get home and see if my neighborhood had survived. The pictures don’t due justice to what we saw, but at least our house was unscathed. Now I can say I have also lived though a tornado. Some in our area cannot say the same. Three kids who lived about ten minutes from us were killed in the storm.