A Harrowing Day

There was a day when I was a kid. It was a Friday, which started out as a beautiful day. A few hours after I had gotten home from school I was in my grandmother's room. I remember that it was getting dark way earlier than it should have been. I looked outside and noticed that it was really cloudy. When I looked up into the sky, I noticed something that scared the hell out of me: a funnel cloud. I started to run down to the next floor but before I got there, everything outside blew to hell. All I could see outside of the bay window was brown dust and debris flying by. It was so loud that I could barely hear anything, but I was yelling for everyone in the house (which I think was my sister, mother, and grandmother) to get downstairs to the basement where we rode out the rest of the storm...which didn't last long, thankfully.

We checked the damage. Luckily, some shingles notwithstanding the house was fine. However, that was a bit lucky. Sometime during the chaos, there was a particularly loud bang. It was a tree in the backyard that had been toppled. It was a really big tree. Very tall. Very thick. It had fallen lengthwise across the yard. It would not have taken a direct hit for that tree to destroy the house.  A shed in the backyard had been blow away. There was a layer of pea-sized hail on the ground. We found out later that the church that I grew up in  had lost its steeple (which ended up taking a long time to replace if memory serves. And of course there was damage elsewhere throughout the city. It's unclear whether or not it was really a tornado, but I always assumed that it was based on what I saw moments before the storm actually hit.

Luckily, it did not take a very long time for life to return to normal. The storm was not very severe (F1 at the worst) and it was rather short-lived. Even though we lost power, it was restored by the end of the weekend at the latest. Since this happened on a Friday afternoon, there were no missed school days (at least that I can recall...my memory isn't that great).

This isn't the only natural disaster that I have experienced, but so far, it has been the most frightening. 

That day was exactly 17 years ago today and was one of the scariest days of my life even to this day.