surviving the storm

It was a near miss, an extremely close call. Those pictures you might have seen on the news of the trailer park decimated this morning? Not even a mile from us. We lost trees. The greenhouse roof was torn off. The tree right outside Dennis' window blew down (thankfully away from the house and just inches from the car). I watched the weather reports almost all night. When I started to doze off, I gathered Dennis from his bed and brought hm to ours. Fifteen minutes before the storm was scheduled to arrive, the three of us were huddled together in our hallway under a futon mattress. We were scared, sure. Dennis was playing a game on the phone, and when the power went out, we activated our mobile wifi and searched the Internet for information. Texts came in from friends wanting to be sure we were In our safe place. We heard howling wind and felt a breeze blowing around us. We pulled down on the mattress, huddling together. Tabasco climbed in with us, anchoring us further with 100 pounds of scared lab. Lemonade cowered in his crate. The sound really is like hearing a train. We weren't sure when it was over, when we could emerge, and so we huddled for quite a while. We shone flashlights around the house, finding that our side door had blown open but seeing no other damage. We napped for a bit before David got up to head to work. He came back in to tell us what damage was visible with the rising sun. As scared as I was while it was happening, seeing all the destruction around the house terrified me. Yes, it was a tornado. Yes, it hit our place. Our attic vents on either end of the house were blown out. Dennis' play tower was picked up and flipped upside down. The tops of oaks and pines were snapped off and lying all around. Trees are twisted, limbs are everywhere, and our house is still standing, our cars unscathed, our lives spared. Thank you, Lord, for the miracle of being alive and sheltered tonight, even with the comfort of electricity returned to us. Oh, we are blessed!