As a young girl, she’d be spread out in her bed, sleeping through a warm summer night with the window open and her curtains wavering lightly in the breeze. The deep rumble of distant thunder would slowly lull her to sleep, until she was finally roused by the first close thunder and purple lightning—but only just.She would immediately fall back into a temporary slumber and open her eyes in that same familiar warehouse. She’d run, frantic, from one of the round burlap bags filling the room to the next, opening each, hands trembling, breath sharp, searching desperately for something she did not know, but never actually noting any contents. The windows in the walls around her were covered in tan, oily paper, giving the room a brown, dim tint, but the storm raged on outside.The thunder of the two worlds fell into step, and slowly the brown warehouse faded as awareness flooded over her and the white-purple flashes again filled the air and silhouetted wind-whipped trees outside. She heard the soft steps of her mother padding down the hallway past her room to check the television for weather.

When I was a little girl, I was afraid of storms. I think most children are. I'd hear thunder in the distance and ask if we could go to the basement. If it was close to bedtime, I was afraid to go to sleep. You could hear it rumbling for miles, and I knew that I could expect to be woken up a short time later as the storm moved in. I always had that recurring dream though.


The times I did feel good about storms though were actually good memories in the end. There used to be such thing as just a normal storm--nothing severe, no immediate threat as long as you didn't go out walking with a kite keychain or anything. On evenings when those normal storms happened, my dad--and sometimes mom--would take me (and maybe my brother at that age) out onto our side porch, facing the storm, but under the porch roof and our old woods-patterned blanket. We would cuddle up on the porch chairs and watch the lightning over the garage, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the thunder. Sure, even the most playful of storms can always do unexpected things, but little childhood me knew that her daddy and mommy only let us do this if it was okay. I wasn't worried.


As I grew up, we had moved, the familiar woods blanket slowly wore out and raised a few families of mice, I think. We didn't sit out and watch storms so much. I always had that little bit of worry, but grew more at ease with age. There were always those few really bad storms here and there--the ones in the evening or middle of the night where Dad told us to go sit in the bathroom, and he'd stand on the porch or at the front window watching the clouds. Refusing to come in to safety, like dads do. He'd give a "Here it comes!" or "Here it is!" as the front arrived or the worst part of the storm moved in. Those were always tense moments. Sometimes we kids would cry to Daddy to please, please come in and be okay.


In high school, I was at the Track and Field Regionals a couple counties up when the sirens started blaring, and we made our way into the gym, and then bowels of the huge, prison-like school holding the meet. It was a system of storms with several tornadoes affecting weather there and at home. Thinking they were being a bit overly cautious sending us so deep into the basement, my coach had me run a few laps out in the perimeter hallway around the underground cafeteria to stay warm for the race. There was no race that night though. I can't recall if there ended up being an actual tornado near the meet, but I do remember standing by my dad, huddled around one of the little TV's mounted on the walls of that room, surrounded by probably hundreds of other runners and fans as the weatherman zoomed in to our very, little, dead end road at home to show where the tornado was going to be. He said the name.
"Shit, Angie, we don't have a house," my dad whispered. Familiar, running community familiar people around us looked at us sadly and sympathetically, whispering, "Oh no, that's Angie's family's road. He said." So luckily for us, it wasn't. So unfortunately, it was a lot of other people's homes, about a mile down the highway.  Almost a decade later, it's still very obvious where it did go. So now it's always a lot more real.


But it gets more real. Through college, there were some scares. We "grew up" at Hanover hearing the stories of the 1974 tornado outbreak that smashed campus and surrounding areas in our region. Working in the archives at the library one summer showed me all kinds of documentation and photos of the event. My freshman year, I had just gotten back to the dorm from practice, was in for a quick shower before a 6pm Chemistry exam, and had just put shampoo in my hand when the sirens started going off. We all rushed to the basement of the dorm, not really knowing what to expect. Those dorms, built like fortresses, always lured me, I think, into a false sense of security, come what may. But there was plenty else to distract me from worrying too much those four years.


In the two years since graduating, I'd say I've had a normal level of inhibitions about storms. I actually very much grew to appreciate them aesthetically over time. This last round, however. This last tornado that my dad saw form from our neighbor's back window while we waited downstairs, that looked like it would stay north, but then turned and got bigger, seeming from the ground to move directly toward our house, that I went upstairs and watched go in horror, watched go toward my town where my mom and sister were at school, toward some of my best friends who I ran back to try to call over the broken phone lines. That tornado that ended up not destroying our house, but came close enough at just a few hundred meters away, that left the road I had taken every day for years to school unrecognizable, that injured and killed people and destroyed their homes, that destroyed one of my best friends' homes but so thankfully left them unharmed, that moved on to destroy an entire neighboring town. That storm that put our silly little area on the national news for the worst of reasons, that turned out to be one of the biggest 2% of tornadoes ever recorded.


If there is any good to be taken from it, it is that we have gotten to see a community, a region, and even a country rally around people in need. It is that in a lot of ways, people realized some things that truly are important. I'd leave it though. If it just wouldn't have happened and never would.


In some ways, I feel like my mind is worse off now when it comes to storms. I feel the serious nerves every time the sky is a little dark, every time the weather says there's a chance for storms, every time I hear a rumble of thunder. I know we always think of these things as isolated incidences, and ask "What are the odds?" Any is too much for me. We were fortunate ones. Dents on cars and roofs are nothing compared to the real damages, and I am eternally thankful and will do whatever I can to help those who do need it. I can't escape it now though. I feel my internal flight response pounding at my consciousness, begging me to get rid of everything, because things don't matter, so why make yourself worry about them? And to please just move somewhere where there can't be tornadoes. Even now, as I hear thunder rumbling in the distance and severe weather warnings on the television, I stopped writing this to put on long pants, put a bag together with my purse, room for my computer/hard drive, and my little box of important things, and unplug anything I can. I feel like it's inevitable. I don't bank on feelings, but what if somehow they are a thing? We had a bad feeling the other week when the tornadoes came. Dad told me to throw family photo albums into our suitcases and grab a couple important things for each of us so we could take them with us to our neighbor's basement, because he had a bad feeling. And I did too. Granted, the weather men/women had been hyping up the warning with good reason for days, but still. It happened. I just have that feeling every time now. And it's probably not healthy, and I feel like a really stupid, horrible person for feeling this way when so many people lost so much and we were lucky enough to not have. But it's still there, pounding at my chest, making me scurry around, and turning those fond memories of sitting on the porch with the blanket sour and tragic.


Where have all the normal storms gone?
I found the dreams again.