This type of weather always scares me.
One February morning when I was 10 years old, I had to have been the only kid who had to go to school at like 10:30 in the morning after a tornado hit our neighborhood that morning. That was a bum deal; I was traumatized and wanted the day off too, but Mama and Daddy made me go.
The week before had been a tornado too, and but the worst of it was that we’d lost a tree that had come within probably 10 feet of hitting our house.
But the next week, a tornado picked up a whole house a hundred yards from my house and put it in the middle of the street, foundation and all. The only reason somebody wasn’t killed was that the people who lived there had moved out a few weeks before.
For months after the tornado, you could see the inside of the Greene’s bedroom, up the street, from where the tornado had torn off the whole front side of their house. They eventually had to tear the whole thing over and build from scratch.
The people’s trampoline next door ended up in the back yard of the house across the street.
Some kids down the street rode their mattress down into their front yard, when the front of their house was torn off and their room was exposed.
I still remember my friend Amanda yelling my name frantically from across the street at like 6 am when the weather had passed and it was safe to go outside. Mama and I walked up the street, and Channel 2 news was there in front of the Greene’s house. Mama was interviewed but so far as we know they didn’t use the footage.
People from all over Carroll County (and probably farther) came driving through the neighborhood for days and probably weeks to rubberneck.
I was in high school or college before I found out that the lay of the land in that part of Carroll County is primed for tornadoes, just because of the contours of the land.
We took down five trees earlier this year in the yard we have now, and it’s nights like tonight that I am so grateful we did that. And I wish we’d taken down about four more that I would go take down now, in hindsight.
I am the Mama who goes and gathers up all my children and shuttles them to bring their blankets and pillows and make pallets on the bathroom floors in severe weather— my kids have grown up doing that and know the drill.
And that is why. Because when I was 10 years old, there was very good reason to be afraid of a storm.
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