Surviving the Storm

This is how we survived- in our garage-floor shelter.

It’s not every day you ride out a tornado. A direct hit from an F3 that was something like 1/2 a mile wide. I never believed it would happen to us, but it sure as heck did, and it took only seconds to blow our house apart, snap off every one of our beautiful  oaks, flatten the surrounding forest, sweep away the barn, trash both vehicles, and bury everything we own under a mountain of debris.

We walked away without a scratch.

This miracle was provided by a sturdy steel box we had installed in the garage floor following the last tornado outbreak,11 years ago almost to the day. Before that, we would hunker in a crawl space under the stairs when severe storms blew through. Yesterday, the crawl space wouldn’t have been enough. Nothing above ground could have protected us from that kind of fury.

This is what greeted us when we crawled up from underground.

On Monday afternoon, Mike was baking bagels and I was upstairs placing an order for some Rives BFK, my favorite drawing paper. Our weather radio had been going off all day long, watches and warnings. The sky was strange: a dirty dark brown cloud cover with gray overtones. It was hot and sticky. The trees were full of warblers and a gray catbird hit the window. Then we got the tornado warning. A big one was coming our way, would probably miss us, but just to play it safe we took to the shelter, taking Gizmo with us (the only injuries I suffered were from a pissed off cat). I took my purse and a flashlight; Mike took his Kindle, God knows why (I guess he wanted to catch up on his reading). We weren’t down there 5 minutes before it hit.

A small bit of artwork, what's left of it. Almost everything else is either blown away, or buried.

It was being recalled anyway.

More a little later. I gotta go-we have errands to run. It’s been a little hectic.