Take Shelter Immediately

My girl lay on the slip-and-slide, letting the water wash over her feat, looking up at the sky. The heat felt oppressive after weeks of cool.

The radio cut off in mid-song. I thought maybe the cord came unplugged, then the shrill emergency signal played. Surely a test, since the sirens weren't going off. I waited for it to end, watching the little angel flop over onto her stomach on her plastic banana peel.

"A tornado is on the ground. Take shelter immediately."

There was information about where, but I didn't hear anything except what I didn't hear, which was "Jackson County." I looked up at the sky, but everything above us was blue, not the green of a pre-tornado sky, not the swirling clouds of the masthead of this blog. Tornadoes were not in my sky.

They were about 30 miles town the road in Higginsville. And then they were 130 miles down the road in Joplin.

Beloved pulled up from the grocery store. "Did you hear the emergency signal?" he asked.

I nodded. "Do you think we should go inside?"

This is what I always ask. We waver, usually, because even if it looks fine, these things can come up quickly, but we also don't want to spend half our summer in the basement because there's a storm down the road heading away from us. But it's always sort of a hard call, especially because I don't want to scare the little angel.

"Will the tornado come here?" she asked, standing up from the slip-and-slide.

And I want to say no. But it's not as easy as telling her there are no scorpions in Missouri and no way a tsunami could get our house. So instead I tell her if we hear the siren or if the air looks funny, we will go inside.

"If a tornado came here, would it get us?"

"Not if we were in the basement."

I hope these are true answers.

My prayers are with Joplin and the other communities in Missouri and across the Midwest that were hit yesterday. The death counts are rising and the footage terrifying. I can't watch it right now, because -- as long as I've lived in the tornado belt, I don't remember ever hearing there is a tornado on the ground take shelter immediately come across the airwaves so bluntly before. It was very, very hard for me to let my daughter get on the school bus this morning.

And I can't really think about much else today.