I feel like a unicorn running as fast as it can across the meadow screaming “Noah!  WAITTTTTT,” to no avail.  I don’t think it’s ever going to stop raining, and the boat is leaving without me.

 

Indiana’s scattered showers.  This morning on the way to school, there were completely dry spots, then a mile or so of blinding rain, then another dry spot, etc, all the way up to the city.  And on the dry spots, I could see the torrential downpour just ahead, like a gray moving curtain.  It was freaky, even for Indiana.

 

We’re heading into tornado season here, and I am deathly afraid of tornadoes.  In the public schools, the tornado drills will be starting soon.  There was something about hallways lined with kids, all in ‘the position,’ that always made me want to start kicking everything in sight.  It was a reflex; it wasn’t my fault; I should been given government money to help me control it.  It’s not my fault I’m lazy, either; show me the money.  I’ve got disabilities. 

 

When the Big Tornado went through here back in ’92, it left such a trail of destruction that even today, you can see its path in places.  Mangled trees are the biggest clue; you can always tell by looking if a tornado did it.  We heard the tornado, that day, but our woods kept us from seeing it.  This county is known for its railroads; the tracks are everywhere, even through the middle of the downtown square, and any time, day or night, you can hear trains.  Now, whenever I hear the trains, I flash back to that day and all I can think of is “take cover.”

 

Schoolkids tend to take the tornado drills very lightly, when they’re young.  In 1993 I had a boy in class who didn’t.  When the tornado hit the year before, he and his mother and sister were living in a trailer in a crowded trailer park, and the funnel hit them directly.  His mother was paralyzed, and lived out the rest of her brief life in a wheelchair.  After that, when the tornado whistle blew at school, he went white as a sheet and took it very seriously indeed.

 

That same tornado sucked a baby out of the arms of its father as the family ran for their lives across a cornfield. 

 

No.  Here in this county, most people take tornadoes very seriously.  We have to; nature isn’t to be bargained with, or even competed with.  Nature will always win.

 

Nature has no compassion; nature doesn’t care if it blows a stick or a child across a field.  Nature would just as soon freeze a person to death as a sunflower.  Nature doesn’t know, or care, if it floods a deserted riverbed or a heavily populated below-sea-level city.  I have a sneaky feeling that if Nature had a brain, nature might shake her head in wonder at anyone who would choose to live in a danger zone, but that’s probably a very unpopular opinion and I should shut up now.

 

Besides, right here in southern Indiana, I have chosen to live right smack on the New Madrid Fault, and any day now the earthquake of the century could hit here.  Do I believe it could happen?  Yes.  Am I in a hurry to get out of here?  Well, yes, but not because of the earthquake.

 

So yeah, rain rain go away, etc, etc.  Please don’t wash away too much of my driveway; I’m hoping to have company soon.