Excitement or Horror

A huge storm hit the Jackson area on Friday afternoon. High, straight winds, hail, and an F2 tornado whipped right through my neighborhood. My next door neighbors on one side lost both of their cars and a detached building that he works out of (along with all of his business supplies). Down the street, multiple homes have trees that are sticking out of them, or have split them in two. The damage seems never-ending. Our electricity has been out since Friday. It was a very frightening storm. I was stuck in the van with my sister’s family and our two dogs while the heavy hail bombarded us. We were luckily a few miles away from the worst of it (my neighborhood) at the time. While I was very afraid, I had to show nothing but calm, for my nephew was sitting in the back seat reciting, “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”

I am so thankful that we were all okay. This is the second bad tornado that I have been extremely lucky through. In September, 2005, while living in northeast GA, my husband and I were woken by a tornado in the middle of the night. It was caused by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (that night). We pushed ourselves into the two-foot space in the bathroom closet of our second floor apartment, next to the hot water heater. When the tornado ended, we went back to bed. The next morning we were woken by police, because Tony’s uncle had panicked when he couldn’t reach us over the phone. Half of the small town we were living in was blown away. We lived directly across the street from a shopping center which was demolished. There was a wedding chapel two doors down that was completely blown away, pieces of it sticking out of our own building. Our roof was lifted three inches off of the building. There was an Econo lodge down the road that lost it’s second floor.

After being so lucky in two tornadoes, and having moved away from NYC 4 days before 9/11…I am afraid that my luck might one day just run out.