Tornado - April 1, 2023

Last evening about 6 p.m., the western sky turned green.  The television was announcing weather alerts.  My cell phone was repeatedly screaming that there was a tornado warning in effect in our area. 

I wasn't much worried.  Storms don't frighten me much.

I and my oldest two granddaughters had just come home from the town where I work, having been shopping for a dress for Granddaughter #1.  We hadn't found a dress, but we had a back-up plan to shorten a formal-length dress my granddaughter already had.  She put on her dress and I chopped it off and was sweeping up scraps when The Husband came home.  The wind was kicking up pretty good, and in a few minutes, marble-sized hail started falling.  I could see sheets of rain moving toward us across the field.  

The girls' parents arrived to pick them up just as the rain got here. We made our safety plan, then I stepped out to the front porch to look at the sky.  To the west, a tendril of cloud looked suspicious.  

The wind started whistling,  Sticks and leaves were blowing around.  Then I heard a rumble and thought it best to go inside.

The power went out.

It got loud, with wind and rain pelting the windows, and then it suddenly got quiet, and the sun came out. 

We all kind of joked around about how quickly it had passed.  I walked out to the back porch to get something off the table, and when I turned around, I saw that a BIG-ASSED TREE had fallen in our side yard.

I could not believe the shed wasn't crushed.  Looked up.  Two other trees had caught it before it hit the ground.  Had they given way, it would've flattened the front corner of the shed.

There was a big limb in our back yard that had come from a tree in the front.

When we all finished gawking from the back porch, we moved around front.   At Uncle B's yard across the street, the top of a big pine had been twisted off and was laying in the road.  

My son got on the tractor and moved the pine limbs, but farther up the road, more trees had fallen.  We soon learned by chatting with passing traffic that the other end of our road was blocked, as well.  It wasn't long until we began to hear chainsaws in the distance; the "good ol' boys" had arrived to clear the roadways.

Our cell phones do not work when the power goes out (we live in the black hole of the cellular universe).  We still have a land line, and saved an old princess telephone for times such as this.  We plugged it up, and it immediately started ringing with news that several places in the county had been hit by a tornado.

The south side of the town where I work is torn all to pieces.  Horrible damage to homes and businesses.  If there were any fatalities in the county, I haven't heard about them, but people in neighboring counties were not so lucky.  We heard that this tornado tore up things over 150 miles from here.

The Husband and I spent the day cleaning up sticks, glad to be doing it, glad to still have a house, glad to still be here.  He got out the chainsaw and sawed up the big stuff.  I ground up more than a wheelbarrow load of the little stuff with the limb grinder. 

I don't know what we're going to do about the big-assed tree.  Someone who has some major equipment and knows what they're doing is going to have to handle this one.  :-\