Look Out, Antie Em

Ever since I was a little girl, glued to the TV set watching The Wizard of Oz, I've had a morbid fascination with tornadoes.

I've had those reoccurring dreams where I'm running from one looming in the distance, and searching for a neighbor's house with a basement.
Knocking on doors, hoping for a kind-hearted soul who will let me in to take cover with them.
As a child, my parents sometimes were with me...sometimes not. Sometimes I was on foot, other times I was in car, and we were trying to outrun it.
But my dreams always find me escaping at the last moment, after a heart-pounding few minutes.

My grandmother once told me of looking out her little house in Oklahoma as a girl, and seeing three tornadoes off in the distance all at once.
My mouth would hang open at this, trying to envision a flat land as far as the eye could see, with angry twisters on the horizon.
It was always a stretch, since I grew up in the northwest where tall evergreens and rolling hills are the norm...and virtually no twisters.

Yesterday, however, one did, indeed, touch down in the nearby city of Vancouver, Washington.
(Yesterday's actual tornado)

We saw no evidence of any of the commotion here at home, however... except for a unusual warmth in the air and having both sunlight and rain at the same time. So, at lunchtime we were oblivious to the fact that only a few miles away, a tornado was causing havoc and damage...
(Courtesy American Med. Response, Clark Co.)

Thankfully, there were no reports of injuries! And that is a miracle when you see all the countless photos of damage throughout the area and hear the accounts.

In fifth and sixth grade, I actually lived in Vancouver. And strangely enough, I had a friend who had been injured in the big notorious Vancouver tornado of 1972 a few years before which had come right through her grade school.

Yes, tornadoes, although rare and usually weak, due occasionally stop in our area of the Northwest from time to time. And once in awhile, they can even be truly menacing.
So, to have this recent one so close to home is a little unnerving.

Still, I'm truly hoping that the only tornadoes I come into direct contact with will be either in my dreams... or in black and white Kansas before Dorothy lands in Technicolor Oz.