On Sunday as we were driving home from the girls’ graduation party, we ran smack in the middle of a storm.  It was a bad storm.  One of our nieces called us up on the cell and told us that there had been some tornado touch downs and rotation.  We found a talk radio station with the weather, and they said one of the towns we had just passed had some rotation in the clouds.  Fabulous.

I was watching the clouds as Brian kept the car on the road through the pouring-almost-white-out rain.  I was also shaking.  The kids slept through the worst of it.  I hate, hate, hate thunderstorms.  I take the kids and go to the basement whenever a bad storm blows through.  Just in case. 

Even straight-line winds are pretty damaging, as we found out last fall.  Ever been outside when straight line winds hit?  I have, at night, when you couldn’t tell if it was just the wind or a tornado.  Scared me bad.

Growing up we had a bad storm hit our house.  We were outside riding our horses when we saw the storm systems collide in the sky.   The air was electric and we knew it was going to be bad.  The horses were turned out so they could run if they needed.  When the storm started to rage our next door neighbors came over and we all went down into the root cellar.  They didn’t have a basement.  We were out of power for a week and lost many trees in our 1/8 mile driveway.  I remember my Grandma lost about half the trees in her yard, too, and she lived about a half hour away at the time.  Needless to say the chain saws were going non-stop for awhile.

I didn’t get any pictures of the clouds, even though I had my camera with me.  I was more concerned with what the clouds were doing than what they looked like. 

Unfortunately a little boy lost his life when a tornado hit his house and blew it into a swamp.  It’s such a sad story, but the parents came close to losing both their kids.  A heroic neighbor gave their daughter CPR when he found her without a pulse.   I’m glad to know there are still heros out there.