We looked at each other as the earsplitting alarm sounded first on my phone, and then before I could silence the blare, on Heidi's, too. It was a tornado warning, not even a watch, and it directed us to find shelter in a low, interior room immediately.
Unbelievably, in the nearly 25 years we have lived in our house, a tornado? Has never been a threat. "Where would that even be?" Heidi asked, reading the all-caps alert.
"Uhh," I thought about it. "I guess the bathroom?" I rose from my seat and opened the door to the powder room. Although it did have an exterior wall, it was windowless, and maybe on ground level? It was hard to know how far the unit below us extended. It would be a tight squeeze for us, two cats, and the dog, though.
Outside, the sky was dark as dusk, and a heavy rain began to fall. "Let me check a few things," I said to Heidi and found a real-time tornado tracker. There I saw that the rotation had not touched down and also we were not in its direct line, but rather on the outside corner of the possible range. "I think we can stay out of the bathroom for now," I reported, but chanted a quick protection mantra and kept my eyes on the screen.
A little while later, the alert expired. And a little while after that?
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