I'm watching my husband spackle our kitchen ceiling. It's a new beginning for our kitchen, a new beginning five years in the making. But it comes on the heels of mass destruction just one state over in Oklahoma City, where tonight parents are wondering where their babies are.

It's not fair.

All I could think all afternoon is that it's not fair Chateau Travolta is still standing.

We had a tornado watch all day.

What leaves, what stays: It's not fair.

My daughter fears the tornados. She has trouble falling asleep in the midst of a heavy thunderstorm. I remember feeling that way as a child, living in a house my parents built on the footprint of another house destroyed in a tornado, as if the same thing couldn't happen twice.

Surrender, Dorothy.

But we live here, in the Midwest, in the land of extreme weather, of pop-up storms where the warm winds of the Gulf of Mexico kiss the winds of Canada on a fairly regular basis.

We live here, and we hope.

But whether or not our homes are torn asunder, there is one guarantee: It's not fair.

Tornadoes have shaped my faith. We all need grace, because in the land of dust storms and redemption, nothing is as it seems, and no amount of clean living can save you from the cold front meeting the warm front and dancing.

You may live another day, you may lose your house, you may lose everything. Or you may not. It's not fair, and it's not even predestined. It's just ... there.

And so, tonight, my heart breaks for Oklahoma City and its suburbs. I'm so sorry.

It's not fair.

And I love you all. I wish there were some way I could do more.

As the Corolla sits stinking up my garage, Beloved is back in the Ozarks. And it's occuring to me I don't actually even know where. Have I learned nothing? I mean, I talked to him last night and this morning, and I forgot to ask both times. He was somewhere last night and he'll probably be somewhere different tonight, and after ten or twelve different times of him road warrioring his way across Missouri every week, I've grown more accustomed to this new life of ours. The only problem is my absent-mindedness. I have my head in my novel, and that means I forget to do stuff like turn on the coffee pot and ask my husband where he's sleeping.

There. I just texted him.

And printed my boarding pass for my flight tomorrow to Dad 2.0.

My parents will be here soon to be here for the little angel when she gets home from school because Beloved will get in late on Thursday.

I worry about my parents driving down here. I worry about Beloved driving around Missouri. I worry about me flying to Austin. But that's what people do. They move freely about, even though it's a dangerous world out there. It does no good to sit in your house and hide from that world.

When the worry comes, I try to imagine a big windshield wiper sweeping across my thoughts and pushing them away. Sometimes it helps.

Sometimes I just crawl back into the novel in my head, where I control whether or not there are tornadoes.

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.

I hardly ever check Facebook (I admit it -- I'm just not really a Facebook person). So I probably took a few days to respond to my friend Jenny's mail, but when I opened it, I was touched by her heart and her family's goodwill.

Jenny and her family are collecting books and school supplies for Hackleburg, Alabama, which was recently flattened by a tornado. Here's the logo her son drew.

Jenny's currently got a bin sitting on her front porch in the Kansas City metro area, but since I'm not sure I want to just, oh, post her address here, please email Jenny at jennymeade311@gmail.com if you want access to that bin. I'm sure she'll only have you body scanned once.

Jenny writes:

If you live outside the area, I urge you to start your own collection, or go here and donate in other ways. If you want to know more about Hackleburg, Alabama, visit this Facebook page.

I know there are lots of other little towns with massive destruction like this one. I know there are more people who need help. I know there is much to do. I am one woman, we are one family, we are four states away, and this is what we can do. Do something, whatever you can do.

I remember posting my husband's essay about Parkersburg, Iowa, in 2008 after he received this text from his brother: "f4 tornado hits parkersburg. town gone." At this time of year, I always hear people from other areas of the country ruminating on tornados. They are fascinating and terrifying in their randomness, and when they hit, time after time, it's tempting to succomb to tornado and disaster fatigue and stop doing. I know I feel that way. I am sick of the disasters, sick of the sad stuff, sick of digging deep.

That's why I love what Jenny is doing. It's not hard to weed through your kid's bookshelf (which I am doing this weekend, Jenny) and find some great books to donate. You'd do it anyway. Smart projects take the behavior people are going to do anyway and turn it into good.

Like rebuild. Looks like the Parkersurg city-wide garage sale is this Saturday.

It's always worth it.