Tornado warning

I know I like to point out things that are different, odd, or just plain annoying about life in the south. I like to whine about scary bugs and plants, the way people talk, how long it takes to get anything done around here, and the crazy bumper stickers put on their cars. But on the whole I would argue that that was all there was to worry about down here: innocuous nuisances.

Until yesterday anyway. As I had just started on my 90 mile-drive home, both my husband and a friend called me at the same time to let me know there was a tornado warning in effect in our town. Not a watch, where the “conditions” are right, but an actual real-live warning. As in, someone somewhere has seen a tornado race around. And mind you, this was not in the big semi-city that includes the base, the mall, and endless subdivisions, no, it had been limited to the little bitty unincorporated hamlet that sits south of all of this. The one where we live. We’re talking an area of maybe ten square miles, where circular winds had been sighted, and all they were doing was waiting for the funnel cloud to hit the ground. Great.

Now slap me upside the head and call me an idiot, but as far as I know, we did not move to Kansas, and our dog is not called Toto. Our neck of the woods has a lot of bad things (poison ivy! Poisonous snakes! Confederate flag-waving rednecks!), but tornadoes are technically not one of them. Well, was I ever wrong. As I was on the phone with husband-dear who was also on his way home, he could see black circular clouds swirling around overhead. As he got closer to home, he told me they were converged right over our neighborhood, and were coming closer and closer to the ground. It was not pretty, and apparently he has never covered the eight miles from base to our home that fast.

While I’m hearing all of this, I’m driving down a sunny interstate, with not a cloud in sight, wondering if my house and family will still be there when I get home. The boys had hidden in our walk-in closet with Zoe, and closed and barricaded the door. They assured me over the phone that they “had it under control”, and knew exactly what to do. But when they said they had to hang up because they now had to put their hands over their heads as they had learned in school, momma felt anything but reassured.

I’ve often cursed my endless commute, but nothing like yesterday. I wanted to fly down the highway, but decided that the last thing anyone needed was a speeding ticket or worse. So all I could do was hope and pray things would be alright. And fortunately, the circular clouds decided to stay up above the ground. When my husband called me half an hour later, they were all standing on the back porch, admiring the second (!) circle of clouds and winds passing right next to our house.

That little experience took at least two years off my life, and makes me yearn for little nuisances like cockroaches and yellow flies, and people who can’t say “no”. Now excuse me while I go and enjoy a good luck at the truck with the confederate flag on it parked, I’m sure, not too far from here.