3...2...1... tornado

Here's the play-by-play. Friday night, DH and I did our usual camp-out on the living room couch, and got to bed by about midnight-thirty. The weather-man was predicting storms, which bummed DH out a bit, needing to mow the lawn Saturday as he did. But oh well, we said, we can take the car for its oil change and then just get some housework done if it rains all day. I guess in the back of our minds we knew the storms had caused some trouble in the mid-west and to be on alert, but we proceeded as normal.

3:45 a.m... I wake up to the delightfully creepy sound of the county sirens. I lay there and listen for the full five minutes, and no one else in my house stirs. There's nothing going on outside, so in my sleepy state I can't figure if they're just testing the alarm, or what. Five minutes more I lay there, all is still and quiet. And then, it starts raining. And then, it sounds like hail. Hmm. I get up to look out the bathroom window, just as I start hearing what sounds like branches and leaves hitting the house. DH wakes up, startled. And when I lift the shade in the window, our enormous poplar and sycamore trees (don't know quite how I could see so well, as it was the middle of the night) are absolutely bending IN HALF with the wind. I tell DH that the sirens went off, and he determines that we'd better make haste to the basement. I think his exact words were, "Get downstairs, NOW." I grab AJ and down we go. At the front door, we hesitated, because there seemed to be a lull... then we saw a flash of that famous green lightning. I've never gone down a flight of stairs so fast!

We stayed downstairs for about 30 minutes, with poor AJ going, "AJ room? AJ room?" What, standing under the staircase at 4 a.m. isn't your idea of fun, kiddo? So innocent. I kept thinking of my elementary school tornado drills, where they'd have us line up down the hall and crouch with our heads covered, facing the walls. If kids weren't scared of tornados before that, they certainly were after. Creepy. We just stood there waiting. Wondering if it was safe to peek out the window. Watching the power flicker.

After it was over? all quiet again. Like it never happened. I'm sure it rained more throughout the morning, but we went back to bed and slept pretty hard 'til about 7:30.

Y'all, the thing went right through our subdivision. Next morning, in the quiet rain, we learned that one street over, uprooted trees had fallen on homes. Cracked trees had crushed a few fences. We had plenty of cleanup, ourselves, but we were BLESSED to live on the right side of the hill -- no damage. They've been saying it was "just" an F-zero or F1. But Lordy, we spent all of Saturday grateful: 1) that AJ enjoys picking up sticks (ha), 2) that we have a basement, and got our butts down there, and 3) that we weren't on the phone with the insurance company trying to figure out how to get our life back.