It's 9AM
I watched the weather roll in last night.
The tornado alert went off, again, and like most suburban men, I stepped outside to take a look.
Because just an hour earlier, I stopped working outside.
It was too hot.
I’m a big believer in no such thing as “too” when it comes to heat.
The opposite is not true.
Too cold usually means below 40 with high humidity.
The kind of wet cool that seeps through the cracks in clothing and searches for bones to make ache.
Heat though, is the opposite.
Everything is warm and loose.
Especially when it approaches a hundred.
I feel like I could run a marathon straight off the couch.
Or mow and trim and haul mulch.
Take down three twelve foot bushes in a spot where we know we want to do something, but what is to be done has yet to be determined.
Work.
And after almost three hours of it, I was wiped.
Blue skies, nothing between earth and the sun but some cosmic dust.
Blazing.
So I grabbed a shower and a cold one and sat down to read some in the cool dim interior of a house to myself.
Except…
Through the front window I could see the light shift.
From blue to gray to a sickly sort of green.
And when it does that, we know what it means.
Something swirly this way comes.
The TV told me a line of storms were marching across the state, packing eighty mile per hour winds and “potential” tornados.
I grew up in Arkansas.
There are always potential tornados.
Especially on super hot days and a line of cells coming through.
I stepped out to see the shelf wall of clouds, which is when the sirens went off and I looked for the swirl in the sky.
I always get just a little tinge of worry whenever we have a warning.
If it hits, the accumulated stuff in the attic, and closets are going to be carried, spread and scattered across the lake behind us, and points beyond.
Pictures of my mom, pictures of my Dad, a lifetime of scribbled notebooks and memories.
The threat of a tornado is enough to make me wish for a moment for a big iron box to lock it all up in, and keep it safe.
Then I wish we made houses better, with more “resistant” techniques.
I mean, a direct hit of 150 mph winds is tough for any material.
But they hurricane proof homes on the coast with “code” standards that are supposed to make them better able to weather storms.
Or maybe new home designs could just have more curves and less hard edges which give the wind an angle to grab and rip.
All easy to think about when the sky is green and the rain is here and the sirens get muffled by sheets of rain that slick one way then the other.
Washing away the heat, and sending me and a few other suburban men scampering back inside for shelter.
And twenty minutes later, it was gone.
Just a gentle rain to water the lawn.
A reminder that this too shall pass, and tomorrow we’ll grow and next weekend, we’ll be back at it.
Mowing, and trimming and weeding all the spots, parts and pieces that did not get finished today.
Maybe we’ll have figured out what to do with our better view by then.
Speaking of views, I’m halfway to a “required” subscriber count on Youtube. Help a brother out by going there, click Subscribe, and let’s get that number by July.
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