…Another time that tornado activity came too close for comfort was on a Thursday afternoon when Cary was teaching, of course. The sky was threatening severe weather, and on the internet Doppler radar, I could see a dark red cell directly to the west of us. The kids were all inside relaxing in our upstairs living room, having completed their homeschool work at 3pm, and it was too early to feed livestock. I went out the back door to get a visual, and saw a very dark, very wide storm cell that went all the way to the ground on the horizon directly west of us. It was about ten miles away. At this point in time, the term “super cell’ was being used for large tornadoes that are often a mile wide; this was not the funnel cloud we were used to seeing in the old days.
I hollered to all the kids to head to the basement. We went into our master bedroom which is at the center of the lower level and has no windows. We sat on the bed, and I popped in a video to distract us from the impending hit that seemed to be inevitable. Before we started the show, I huddled the kids to pray. We prayed for several minutes, then there was a deafening silence which is the worst sound of all in tornado weather. Immediately, that frightening and eerie “freight train” sound followed. We continued praying. When the sound of wind and rain was overhead, I hit the video play button, and headed upstairs, and the kids remained downstairs. Rain was pouring down. I went to the front door, which is on the east side, and looked out. About a mile to the east I saw the same black cell I had seen before on the west side of the house. Miraculously, out of mercy, apparently the Lord had lifted the storm right over our home and farm, and sent it on towards the east. After the rain stopped, I went out and saw that everything important was still intact. There were just a few buckets blown here and there. The roads and our driveway were passable when Cary drove home from Denver eight hours later at midnight, and we breathed a sigh of relief, once again, as we climbed into our dry and warm bed in the bowels of a 90-year-old stucco house on the prairie, that still stood….