Tornado Warning!

Just before 9 p.m. on May 4th, I was sitting in my office organizing music for the wedding.  I was vaguely aware of the wind picking up outside the windows and had the fleeting thought that I might need to move away from it.  The huge Cypress that stands just outside has a tendency to lose limbs the size of small trees in high winds and after we get a lot of rain; it has done so in the past and limbs have gotten caught up in the power lines and swung just outside those windows.  I tend not to be too close to them in certain weather conditions. I began to finish up what I was doing to make the move to another room....

The Living Room T.V. was on but was muted so that I could listen to bits and pieces of the playlist I was creating.  David was upstairs making notes and watching a recorded game on the bedroom T.V. and Hunter had just gotten in the upstairs shower. Obviously, no one was paying any attention to what was going on around us.  This is not usual for us since I'm typically a weather watcher calling family and friends to say "conditions are ripe for a tornado, stay aware please - Love you!".   Spending 8 years of my childhood in Ohio and another 5 in Indiana, I'd been through tornados and knew the destruction they can leave in their paths.  

Nikki and J.C. were at their place watching the weather reports - since the networks had interrupted regular programing to make those reports minute by minute as the storm moved towards our place.  Just before 9 p.m., as I was listening to the winds pick up outside that office window  Nikki texted David.  "Dad, there is a tornado right over you!  The report says its at" and she named the three roads that surround our farmhouse.

........

Since February, every spare minute of daylight was spent getting our place ready for the wedding.  The inside was ready. The outside was getting its final touches.  The gardens were weeded, all the pruning was done; edging had been laid around the patio to hold back debris from the surrounding gardens.  All that really remained was to finish the Gazebo and finish laying the new pathways from the patio to the back gate and barn area, pressure wash the house,  and bring in the flowers that would be in the colors that Nikki had chosen for her wedding....

 

We'd spent three days laying pathways.  Using a 2x4x12 to keep the edging straight as we dug down almost four inches to allow for the stones that would soon line them.  Before the rain hit us on Thursday night (May 2nd), we'd already put down 2 trailers full of stones.  I'd laid two full pallets of sod.  On Friday, David had brought in the last trailer of stones which was sitting in our parking area waiting to be put down.   One more day of work and those pathways would be ready for the wedding. 

David pulled the truck up beside the barn after unhitching the trailer.  I'd parked the car between the truck and the fields hoping to be able to spray weedkiller in the stone parking area after shoveling the new stone into the pathways sometime that weekend.   In nine years, I'd say those vehicles were not parked in their regular spots only about a dozen times because we need to keep the driveways clear for the tractors to work the fields.  They'd been harvested that week so we knew we had a month or so to not worry about that and we needed to get that parking area weeded...we'd be very glad that we weren't parked there.....it was one of the blessings we would be granted that night.