First Blog.
My muse is a tornado.
An EF2, according to the National Weather Service. It hopped, skipped and jumped through our small town. It missed us, but five houses down the street, it did some damage. Across the field, it tore the steeple from the roof of our church.

It missed us. Not a shingle out of place. Not a limb from a tree. Nothing.

It just seemed to me that warrants ... something.

So I decided to start a blog.

We have a weather radio. And we sleep upstairs. Common sense says Don't. Sleep. Upstairs. if you KNOW severe weather may produce an overnight tornado. But the timing of the coming storm should have allowed us most of a night's sleep, so we elected to enjoy the comfort of our own bed and to trust the weather radio to wake us in time. And it did. At one minute before five a.m. the blare of the siren screamed out a tornado warning; we jumped up and headed down to our 'safe place' under the reinforced stairwell, which we keep prepared with chairs, flashlights, extra batteries, radio, pillows, blankets, and ... you get the picture. And we waited - having had the forethought to turn on the coffeemaker ... in relative comfort - while we listened to the storm report on TV.  Okay. It's not that comfortable. And nothing was happening. It wasn't even windy. After fifteen minutes we were pretty sure nothing was going to happen where we were. The weather map showed it had passed us. Another cup of coffee and we started planning our day. Whew. Sighs of relief. Glad we had the weather radio. Had the newspaper arrived yet?

And then the phone rang. "Are you okay? Is your power out?"

The really weird thing is, we didn't feel anything. And it was right down the street. Right across the field. If it hadn't been dark, we could have seen the funnel.  We were fine and our lights didn't even flicker. Not once. (and sometimes our lights flicker if a breeze hiccups).

Of COURSE, we got out in the car to see what had happened around us. You can't NOT do that when you live in a small community (I don't care who you are). Thankfully, there were no injuries in our little town. Not to people. Cows and chickens took a big hit though. Which means farmers will pay. Debris from the chicken barns was everywhere (and there's this THING, I don't know what it IS, that goes out in the fields without harming the field, even when it's wet, and just retrieves all that metal - it's like a miracle to a non-farmer like me). Carports in view of my house flew away. Siding ripped off. The steeple from my church, gone. On a lighter note ... there's not a trampoline left in town. Above ground pools didn't fare well either. And a sad note ... three homes were completely destroyed. Miraculously, the people in them lived. I saw the rubble and marveled. Folks crawled out. They were cut out. They lost everything. But they lived. Silos were destroyed. Barns collapsed. But people lived.

And some of us lost nothing.

They're talking about 'survivor guilt' on TV. They were actually speaking of folks in those hard hit towns where dozens of houses were destroyed, and there were so many fatalities in this deadly outbreak of tornadoes. About folks who survived but their neighbors didn't. They weren't talking about people like us.

But I understand the guilt. We drove by one of those flattened homes this afternoon. A woman was just standing there. Just looking at the mess. Insulation. Jumbles of stuff. Rubble. Broken things. Unidentifiable things that had possibly been hers. I didn't know her, but I wondered by the set of her shoulders if she'd lived there. And I was so sorry. I wondered, as we drove down the road back to our house, who would help HER clean up. We'll donate. We'll help the relief effort. But who will help HER?

March roared in like a lion. I pray it will be content to let that be IT for the entire month.
End. Blog One.