Electric Twisters

When we went to bed last night, there was a great deal of wind, rain, thunder, and lightning. Many people already know the wimp that I am when it comes to those meat-eaters of the sky. Alright, that requires explanation, I think.

When I was a small child in the desert of south-central Arizona, monsoon season not only brought added humidity to the hot weather, but it also brought a lot of night thunderstorms. On one occasion during my dinosaur phase, I asked my parents after one loud clap of thunder if that was a plant-eater or a meat-eater. Somehow the dinosaurs had left the planet but not the atmosphere, thus explaining those loud grumblings from the sky.

In any event, as long as I can remember I have been afraid of thunder. Most of the time, as long as I am in the same room as someone else, then I am not as afraid, or even if it's during the day. But, thunder alone at night still scares me, which explains why as a 17-year-old my parents would still wake up to find me on the couch in their bedroom the morning after such a storm. Since I've been married, I still cannot sleep through thunder, but I at least don't get as scared as I used to.

In Ohio, we've seen our fair share of thunderstorms. It was particularly bad the first Fall that we were here. But here, thunderstorms also mean rain or even hail, and in certain times of the year, they can also mean tornadoes. The first tornado sirens that I ever heard were late one afternoon the first Fall here when I was driving home alone from school. I had already gotten off of the freeway because of the bad rain, and then the rain stopped just in time for me to hear the eerie tornado sirens start. We heard quite a few tornado sirens that season, and it started to seem like a sort of weather-man crying wolf routine. In the last year, however, we have only ever had lots of rain with some thunder. Until last night.

Last night, as I mentioned, we went to bed already in a storm. Ironically, I had only an hour or so previously had a conversation with my parents in which I had expressed my wish for "a good rain" to get rid of all the pollen and tree-puffs that have been floating around all week. I definitely got a lot more than I bargained for. Only a few hours after we went to sleep, we were suddenly wakened at 4:10 am by the eerie tornado sirens. Although we got up and I grabbed my violin and purse to go downstairs with, I was still thinking of all the times that it had come to nothing last year. Well, when we got downstairs, we turned on the TV to find that not only were the tornado sirens real, the storm that had already produced twisters in Indiana and was now threatening central Ohio was literally in a path headed straight for our precise location and at a speed of 55-60 mph.

At this point, we took ourselves, our documents, my violin, and our wind-up radio and flashlights into the first-floor closet since we have no basement. We turned on the radio and finally found the one station that was actually alerting the public to the situation. There was about a ten minute period when they weren't sure whether the storm was going to develop any twisters or not, but then the brunt of it passed over us, and we were only at a severe-thunderstorm warning status instead of a tornado warning status. Outside of the closet, we stayed up for another hour or so to wait out the rest of the storm, which though it moved really fast was really big with lots of cells to pass right over us. And then when the last cell passed over, we went back upstairs to bed. After a great deal of wind, rain, hail, lightning, building-shaking thunder, and thanks to Providence no tornadoes, we were safely back asleep by 6 am.

I have to admit that huddled together in that closet with the tornado sirens' otherworldly wails, I felt like the children of Israel the night the destroying angel passed through Egypt, praying that our door was visibly marked with the blood of the Lamb. And so the storm passed over, and we can give thanks that we and everyone around us are safe.