Severe storms blew through last night. The alert on my phone said “severe” for flash flooding. A little while later, another alert ranked as “severe”. BASEBALL-SIZE HAIL was in all caps. In both cases there were no cautions to stay home but instead direct orders to take immediate cover. It’s rare they label these warnings as “severe” here.
Trying to fall asleep and looking at the sky, all I saw were flashes. Constant flashes. With the wind and the torrential downpour, my instincts spoke one word that I dread: tornado.
The last time the sky looked that way, my son and I were living in my van, parked at an RV park in the Florida Panhandle. We had the choice of staying in the van or fleeing to the little bunkhouse for “shelter.” It was mostly made of glass. With one bar of cell signal, my friends at the time were trying to tell me about its path. It was after midnight. You couldn’t see it and the radar on the phone weather app wasn’t working.
On its approach two miles coming directly at us, it split from one into two. Both strands went about a mile around on each either side of us. A miracle. A pure miracle if you ask me. But I never forgot the sky or how I felt.
As I laid in my bed last night, I tried mentally prepare myself for baseball-sized hail crushing my van, and along with it any options of getting to a new job or training for a new job that I’ve been trying to get but don’t yet have. I tried to stop my mind from haggling with insurance adjusters that don’t exist.
My text to my son indicated he as already home when the storm hit. He hadn’t gone out with his friends.
Howls. Torrential rain. Flashes upon flashes through the curtain.
This morning, I found that we were under a tornado watch and then a warning.
I didn’t want to look last night. Like in the van, there was no place else to go or be or to flee to. Being scared wouldn’t have helped. Had things had gotten louder, I would have taken the dog and we would have sheltered in the bathtub with me, but it didn’t. I slept well.
According to the reports, there might be more of that today.
