Snoopin’ with the Snoop

I miss the days when I was younger, when it seemed that every Tuesday night, with my mom’s chicken still on the grill cooking for dinner, with her tasty barbecue sauce, our dinner would be interrupted by a severe thunderstorm warning. We joked that the storms came for her good cooking.

Or, weeks that my dad went on business trips, when we were sure to get a tornado warning in the dead of the night. I remember one night, where the walls were visibly inhaling and exhaling in a pressured rhythm until the damper on the fireplace slid open. That may seem like nothing much, but my mom used to have to pound the damper handle with a hammer to get it to open. When we ventured out the next morning, the cap on my neighbor’s chimney was gone, and his staggered wooden fence was dismantled as if someone had walked along it, gently lowering each log on his way. Such strange happenings.

I’ve been told that most people go through their lives without ever having seen a tornado. I count myself lucky to be among those who’ve seen one (more than one actually), and also haven’t been touched by it. Physically touched, or negatively emotionally touched; I’ve definitely been touched with a love of severe weather.

I’ve seen five tornadoes, a funnel cloud, and rotation that later became a tornado. I was actually scared of thunderstorms, even the calm ones, until I was in fifth grade. I remember before fifth grade, when my mom and dad would be putting away the dishes after I had gone to bed, and I would hear the cupboards shut, and I would sneak out of my bed timidly asking them if we were in a thunderstorm. I was much like our dog, Oliver, in that way, as he was terrified of thunderstorms as well, though he wasn’t afraid of the cupboards. During one of our numerous tornado warnings, my dad, as usual, was wandering around the house looking out the windows, peering this way and that trying to get the best view of the clouds. Occasionally, much to my mom’s dismay, he would roam outside looking into the sky. I remember trying to convince him to come to the basement with me, yet he very insistently asked my sister and me to come look at the cloud that was rotating above our house. Terror turned to fascination. Since then I’ve seen only one tornado. Four tornadoes before and the lone funnel cloud before as well.

We’ve avoided the brunt of all storms so far since I got back in mid May, much to my dismay. All we’ve gotten is rain. And lots of rain. The ground is waterlogged, but so far of the creek has not flooded. I detest nightly tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, because since the sun isn’t around, I can’t see the cloud formations. We’re under a tornado watch until 2 a.m., and it doesn’t look like anything is going to happen before sundown, so if anything happens after then, I’ll be quite disappointed.

The tornadoes I’ve seen:

• Heyworth cone
• NE column
• 2 tornadoes and a funnel cloud while on the expressway in Colorado on vacation
• The F0 fluke, on the day before I started junior high school, in the field south of our subdivision

(With a bit of editing, I could turn this into a creative nonfiction piece. Something for me to keep in mind.)