Tornadoes swept through Oklahoma last night. My friend's daughter's car got its windows blown out, but she wasn't injured. A small town down south got hit really hard, a place I'd driven through many times on the way from my ex-inlaws' home in Wilson to the more urban town of Ardmore, in search of pizza, the bookstore, or entertainment. So far, the death toll is 8, with dozens injured, but they're still searching.

All that damage dredged up feelings I'd thought long gone, residuals from the disaster my family survived in 2001. It was October. The weather was doing the same old fickle Oklahoma break dance. One minute it was sunny, the next storms. My daughter Lauren finally came home from school and her father got back from visiting or a meeting. My son Sean was still out on a band trip.
It began to hail, big suckers, golf ball sized chunks of ice. Then the sun broke through the clouds, the rain stopped and so did the wind. It was an eerie calm, the sky shining green above us. Lauren (who was 10 and loved to dance in the rain) scampered out on the front lawn to inspect the hail.

The siren went off. I was inside monitoring the weather on TV. Jon yelled for me to come out on the front step. "You're never going to see anything like this again!"

There, across the empty lot, on the other side of the highway, not even a block away, we watched a funnel cloud pick up a farmer's silo. "Run!" Jon ordered.

He didn't have to tell me twice. I had piled pillows in the hallway.  I threw myself on top of my daughter (poor child). "Mom, you're squishing me," she said. "I don't care," I replied. "I want you safe." Hell, I figured if something caved in, my body would give her at least a modicum of protection. Jon said a prayer. Lauren kept saying, "Oh, oh, oh, oh." We heard the raging wind as it approached the house. "Is that it?" I asked. I kept telling Lauren, "You're safe...you're safe." Something told me I told the truth.

Funny, but I felt calm. We'd done what we could to protect ourselves. What happened next was beyond our control. So, writer that I am, I hunkered over my daughter and told myself to pay attention. Maybe, if I survived, I could use this in a story.

The sound was incredibly loud. Nails screeched as they were pulled from the studs. The booms of our belongings as they hit the walls, the crash of breaking glass formed a cacophony of distruction. The smell of friction filled the air, a burning odor mixed with the scent of dirt and dust from the attic that hadn't been disturbed in years. An horrendous pressure shoved itself into my ears until I thought my head would explode with the push of it. Lauren was still whimpering. I was still telling her she was safe.

Then it was gone. I looked down to see our cat Ginger huddled in the crook of my leg. We had closed all the doors to the hallway, and somehow the ceiling remained over our heads. I opened the door to the master bedroom and saw broken glass and debris scattered throughout the room. Ginger made a break for under the bed safety. She was the only injury...she cut her leg on glass as she made her dash. She needed two stitches.

The roof was gone. So was the ceiling in Sean's room and over most of the house. The Ceiling Fan had landed in my computer monitor. A board had impaled one of the cabinet doors. The neighbors' boat was in the tree outside.
But we'd survived. Later, Sean said he could see the tornado from his school bus window. He said it looked like it was heading for our house. Lauren went through some PTS, and didn't eat for two weeks. That was scarier than the tornado.

I took it as a wake-up call. Life is short. We need to find our happiness, look for our joy and embrace the love with which we are blessed. That's all. No sermons. Just an observation brought on by last night's events and a shared camaraderie with those who went through the storm.