I Saved Us From a Tornado

Peonies are my stepmom's favorite flower, and it's easy to see why. They're big, exuberant flowers with a messy beauty and an intoxicating scent. The neighbors who back up to us have peonies all along the length of chain link fence that separates our yards, and I have been compelled to clip a few - just the ones leaning temptingly over in two-foot shoots, some bending almost to the ground. This bouquet on the dining room table fills the whole house with its sweet, heady fragrance.

The past couple of weeks have been a bit stressful as it's been rainy almost every day or night, and Mike doesn't have work when it rains, or even when the ground's gotten soaked. I remember June being a rainy month when I was a kid, or at least it seemed that way. We'd usually get out of school shortly after Memorial Day, and just as we achieved freedom, a streak of gloomy rainy days would begin and last until my birthday at the end of the month. It was only as an adult that I recognized that dusty, thick smell of impending rainfall as a weather-related phenomenon - when I was a kid I always thought it was the smell of dust on the window sills, since that's where my nose would be planted as I stared out in hopes of a glimpse of sun.

Saturday night we went to bed without knowing that a storm was coming. We fell asleep with the windows closed and the air conditioning on, but at about two thirty in the morning I woke to a rather faint sound of a siren. I tried to rouse Mike: "Is that the tornado siren?" He said calmly, "No, no...." I prodded him, "I think it is." He replied confidently, "No, it's just... part of the promotion." "Hon," I told him, "I think you're dreaming." He claimed he wasn't, but the siren pealed again and I got out of bed - "Okay, that IS definitely a siren." Finally he woke up and realized what was going on.

I scrambled in the dark to put on sweatpants and a hoodie since it would be cold in the basement, and the three of us - dog included - went down to the half bath (aka Man Cave) underground, grabbing a boombox on the way down. Mike had to briefly resurface to grab a flashlight from the kitchen and reported that it was "crazy" outside. We sat down in the bathroom - me in a collapsible camping chair, Mike & Russell on the floor - and listened to AM radio. The storm and possible tornado was moving right through Central Omaha. Power was out in parts of the city, but not for us. Safe in the basement, I worried slightly about our cars, which we only put in the garage if we know there's a storm coming, and we hadn't... mine in particular was sitting directly under the large maple tree in our front yard.

The tornado warning ended at three a.m. and we went back to bed under calm skies. In the morning, despite some downed trees and a few cases of property damage in the city, our neighborhood appeared unscathed. Even my spindly tomato plants made it through intact.

On the local news last night they said that a lot of people slept through the siren and that it's really only meant to alert people who are outside at the time of a tornado. Who knew? They don't give you an instruction manual when you move to tornado alley. Apparently we're all supposed to buy emergency weather alert radios. The funny thing is I had always worried about sleeping through a tornado siren and Mike swore he would definitely wake up if he went off... yet he was the one who thought it was "just part of the promotion," haha. And I, normally a corpselike sleeper, saved our lives. That's right... he owes me bigtime.