Pseudo-Tornado

Anyone who knows me, knows how much I love to experience new things in life. Let me just clarify this statement for any higher source that may be reading this: I am fully content WITHOUT experiencing new natural disasters. We were evacuated from our home when I was nine plus months pregnant with Gwynyth for Hurricane Floyd. It was crazy. It was the first major mass evacuation of an entire coastline in the history of the United States. The scariest part was not the inclement of weather but the inclement of rationality that seemed to take hold. Traffic was backed up for hundreds of miles. It took us ten hours to travel ninety miles--it was bumper to bumper the whole way. People were getting out of their cars beating each other up, some even shot and stabbed others. It was sheer craziness. Before I digress too far, I will just say, that was enough natural disaster for me and I hope that is the worst I evacuation I ever have to experience. The hurricane, however, did relatively little damage to our town. Saturday proved to actually be much more frightening--at least in terms of sheer force of nature.

Saturday morning was booked solid for us, first with a huge service project for our church clearing and restoring a Civil War slave graveyard, then a full slate of soccer games. By 8 am, everything had been cancelled. Brian and I were skeptical. The schools here cancelled school for an inch of snow, so we were quick to mock the cancellations. That afternoon Brian and I ran out alone to get some lunch and on the way back we were laughing at what a pathetic storm it had turned out to be. We even sang a little song about it to the tune of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. I started the goofy jingle, and Brian ended it with, "Please send some rain, please send some rain. Please won't you send a tornado."

Apparently, our little jingle was heard by the universe (so just make note not to sing that EVER again!). Three hours later, I had just woken up from a nap and heard the rain pounding on the window. Brian looked outside and it suddenly got very dark, the sky turning to an eerie greenish color. The wind started picking up in a way that I have NEVER seen. Leaves and branches were flying by our second story window at unreal speeds. I was expecting to see an old lady on a bike fly by any second (da da da da da dun). I felt compelled to watch the horror of it, but I didn't know what was coming. We yelled for all of the children to get downstairs. I ordered them into the closet underneath the stairs. Brian came down carrying two sick sleeping children and ordered us all out of the closet and into the van in the garage. In our house and with nine people, I'm not sure there is a good option, but the nice thing about the van was that we could turn on the radio. We found out that it wasn't a tornado but 70mph winds that were assailing only our section of town (I once again attribute that to our Mr. Roger's song. Ask and ye shall receive :). It didn't last but 15 minutes and then it went silent except for the sound of heavy rain.

We went outside to assess the damage. Every side of every house and every door and every window, and everything else for that matter looked like it had been decoupaged with fresh green leaves, or at least fragments of them. Giant branches littered every yard in the neighborhood. Several yards had trees toppled over and the houses on windward side of the neighborhood had giant trees toppled into their sheds and their fences all but annihilated. Later on in the afternoon, a woman drove up to my house as I was sweeping off leaves plastered to the front porch and rolled down her window. "Excuse me," she called out, "did you guys get a tornado up here in this neighborhood." I told her I didn't think it was a full tornado, just close enough to scare the snot out of us. She responded, "Well, I am looking at buying a house on the next street up, do you think it's safe?" I refrained from outright laughter and calmly said, "The neighborhood is great and very safe from crime, but tornadoes choose neighborhoods at random and if you want to avoid those you probably need more than a different neighborhood, you need a different state!"

After the storm all the neighborhood children took off armed with cameras to document such an exciting event in their lives--ah, but who am I to mock them? Here I am blogging about it! The following are their pictures. I hope that this is the most exciting event of tornado season for the Simons family. I will never sing the Mr. Roger's tornado song ever again! This was more than enough excitement for me.