Stormy Weather

I'm sure that most of you (if you care to know) know about the weather that ripped through the Atlanta area this past weekend. I don't live in the city so the events of Friday passed us by without really knowing what was going on. There had been predictions of storms Friday but we barely had any rain. Hubby and I watched a movie on TV and casually flipped it to the news before we went to bed. We saw that one of the SEC basketball games had been delayed because of the weather, but everything looked okay. My mom called me at 11:30 and I sleepily told her that we were fine, the kids were fine and the weather had been so good here Friday night that I grilled hamburgers for dinner. So I went to sleep.

Early Saturday morning I turned on the news to see what had really happened the night before. Well the little bit of wind I though we had the night before was really tornado. The thing about news like that is that a little part of you always says thank god that didn't affect me. But I didn't have the luxury of relief. Another set of storms was on it's way.

See I grew up in western Pennsylvania. We don't get severe weather. But then all the southerners I know say "what about blizzards?" and my response is the worst snow we get up there is like a really rainy day anywhere else. Maybe it was my teenage sense of immortality, maybe it was not being responsible for anyones life but my own but I don't ever remember watching the news and thinking "what if" I never gathered important papers and a change of clothes to take to the basement with me. I've done these things living in Georgia.

As I sat in my family room Saturday afternoon watching images of the destruction downtown the Sirens started going in my neighborhood. I'm glad we were safe, and we never felt the need to retreat to the basement. But for all they hype of the damage Friday night no one died, on Saturday 2 people did.

See the thing about damage to a 30-60 story building is you can see the damage from more than a mile away. We went to My son's lacrosse game in Decatur Sunday afternoon and from the interstate in midtown you could see the windows that are missing in some of the buildings downtown. My husband used to work in one of the buildings I kept seeing on the news, it happens to be the same building he was in on 9-11. And then just as quickly as the sky had gotten dark the wind stopped blowing and the sun came back out. It was over and we were fine.

This isn't the first tornado to hit metro Atlanta nor will it be the last. I'm glad this one missed us and I hope the next one will too.