Tornado Season

I was out of town when the tornadoes hit, week before last.  Seeing the images on CNN that Thursday morning was heart-breaking.  Calling home, to make sure Atlanta had not been hit.  (I figured CNN would have mentioned that if it had, but just checking.)  Since then, reading about the devasting tornadoes that hit Tuscaloosa and Birmingham and lots of other towns with names that aren't so well known.  Little towns that probably were struggling to keep their downtowns from closing and people moving to bigger towns even before the tornado hit.  Now their downtown is gone and so are a lot of the houses.  Towns where people were born, grew up, got married, and had their children are just gone.

I grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas, and I have strong memories of fear of tornadoes.  Not actual tornadoes - I lived in towns that experienced devastating tornadoes, but they were either before I was born or when I was too young to remember them (and not in the part of town where we lived) - but hearing sirens, and (when we lived in a house with a basement) a few times going to the basement until a particularly strong storm passed.

I went to high school in Woodward, Oklahoma, which had been hit by a devastating tornado in 1947.  Hundreds of homes, damaged or destroyed, and about a hundred people killed in Woodward.  I remember a grave, at Elmwood Cemetery, marked "Unidentified Girl," but there were two unidentified children found in the rubble of the tornado in Woodward, a girl of about 12 and a baby girl.  According to Mike Coppock's compelling accound of the Woodward tornado, there was speculation "that the powerful storm blew them in from Texas, even though the farthest a human body was known to have been carried by a tornado was a mile."

Caroline and I were in Woodward, visiting my mother, in May 2004, when a storm system unleased a series of tornadoes south and east of Woodward.  One of them hit Geary, the town where my parents met as school teachers in the 1930s.  The storms were moving away from us, not toward us, so there wasn't any sense of personal threat - but we kept the television on and watched, mesmerized, as the storm system moved across western Oklahoma.   They knew exactly where the tornadoes were, with great precision, and tracked them from intersection to intersection.  Talking about that evening later, to friends in Atlanta, I said that the local TV stations in Oklahoma cover weather the way the Atlanta stations cover traffic.  Driving back to Oklahoma City to the airport, I remember we saw some storm damage north of Geary - a galvanized metal structure on its size, and broken trees - but it wasn't a really strong tornado and there weren't many people in its path.

The paths of these tornadoes - the ones that just hit Alabama and Georgia and other southeastern states - were long and wide and went through populated areas.  Hundreds of people died, thousands lost their homes.  Lynsley shared the information the other day that there will be a truck at Morningside Presbyterian Church on Wednesday to collect relief supplies.  We bought peanut butter and a big corregated box of diapers at Target yesterday and will be doing some more shopping before Wednesday.  So check the list of what they need and make a trip to your favorite store so you can give a little something to some people who have lost everything.  And if you can't make it this week, they will be there every Wednesday through the end of the month.