Storm of the Year (So Far)

Too much excitement for a Friday. Around 4 in the afternoon, the sky darkened into a thunderstorm. Soon the TV warned us that the odds of a tornado around our part of the world -- our part of the North America, along with large sweeps of land south of us to Texas -- were way up. The rain and wind intensified into the hardest I’d seen this year.

When I felt like venturing near a window or door, I looked for… what? I’ve only seen pictures of tornadoes, and read about how it sounds like a hundred or a thousand trains. By the time you hear that, I figure, you need to be away from windows and doors. While I was at the front door, the municipal sirens went off.

Then the power went out, but returned much more quickly that I thought it would, in a minute or so. The rain kept coming down and I noticed that water was accumulating outside the glass door downstairs. That door is into the lower part of this split level, below ground level, with concrete steps going down from the deck to it. A drain takes water away from the bottom of the steps, and the home inspector warned me to never let that drain clog up. So far I haven’t. Now it looked like it was clogging bad: either leaves and other plant junk on the top of the drain or, much worse, something inaccessibly inside the drain.

The rain and lightning continued, so I waited for a few minutes before dealing with the drain. Good thing, too, since at about 5:30, buckets of tiny hail started to fall, and a huge wind blasted by. It shook the trees and slapped rain against the side of the house. By this time, we were in the small hallway downstairs between a set of interior walls, with doors closed against the nearest windows.

Not a tornado, obviously, since the house and the neighborhood and the town still stand. But not long after, I heard that an actual tornado had been spotted a few miles east of us, moving east, so maybe we got a small foretaste of it. Soon things calmed down considerably, but the rain continued.

By then, a little lake had formed at the bottom of the steps, nearly level with the threshold of the door, so I found my waterproof boots, which I haven’t worn them since snow was on the ground, took a small trash can, and started bailing. The rain was still coming down, punctuated by occasional thunder. After a few minutes, I felt for the drain, grabbing leaves by the handful. Pretty soon I was relieved to see, with most of the leaves gone, a little whirlpool over the drain. So it was the leaves—nearly all pre-coloration green, knocked down by the wind.

By 6:30 the rain had slacked off and it was time to go get Lilly. She’d gone to a friend’s house about a mile away after school that day, and I’d called them during the storm to say that I wouldn’t be picking her up until things calmed down. Usually, it’s a five-minute drive to get her at that house, but after the epic rains, it was a different sort of trip. More on that tomorrow.