Living in Tornado Alley

Last weekend I was captivated by the live images of tornadoes in Oklahoma. Huge tornadoes stretching towards the earth for seconds -- sometimes not even that long and then disappearing back into the churning clouds. A hog farm was taken out. I am sure most of us have seen the footage. It has been a catastrophic tornado season. Do I love tornadoes? No. Am I haunted by them? Yes.
No one in my family has ever had a basement or a cellar, but one of my earliest memories is sitting on my mom's lap in the cellar of my grandma's neighbors -- the Rileys. My knees shaking, listening to the sirens wail through the heavy, humid air. I wasn't scared. Curious is a better word. Sitting in the unfinished cellar, I wondered when we came out what we would find. Would things be upside down? Would the stereo my grandma just bought still be in the same place. Would it be in the street? What about the plants? What would happen to the dishes? When the sirens finally stopped and we emerged from the cellar, nothing had happened. Some trees had lost their branches, hail the size of baseballs had ruined some windshields, but that was all.
Fear came a few years later . . . this time we were at home -- no TV, no phone, only the radio. This is an emergency. Horses in the corral running circles and neighing to be let loose. Dogs barking. They knew something was wrong. Low, pink clouds hanging like cotton balls. My mother stands in front of the couch, talks to my dad. We have to go. It's going to hit. It doesn't matter if I'm six. I know exactly what she means. And my dad laughs. There's nothing to worry about. We're fine. She didn't listen. She had been caught in a tornado before. Once when she was a teenager, she had been working in the fields outside of Lubbock when a tornado hit. They had all lain flat amidst onions? cotton? while the tornado moved around them. She could never forget that. Of course she didn't listen to my dad. So she pulled me outside and we got in the truck, drove two miles to the neighbor's house. No one was home, but they had a cellar. It was locked. My heart nearly jumped out of my mouth. I can never forget the way the clouds started to churn. No tornado came that time either. It doesn't matter. I never felt safe in that house again.
Many years later standing in my mom's driveway my brother and I watched a tornado, thin and twisty as spaghetti spiral from the sky, drop onto the ground. It was miles away, far on the western edge of town. A rainbow formed to the east.