Grateful

Friday nights at our house usually mean pizza for dinner and lounging around on the couch.  And this past Friday started off that very way.  But the television was honed in on the Weather Channel as we watched super cell after super cell hammer our region.

At around 8pm, a tornado warning was issued and Razor ushered us into our cellar.  This was the first time our daughters had ever had to go to the cellar to wait out a storm and they shook with fear.  And tears spilled from their eyes.

We barely heard rain or saw flashes of lightening.  We lit candles and told ourselves that even though we hadn't seen a drop of hail at least we had put the cars safely in the barn.

We live in a small, rural town that doesn't have it's own television station and only a small weekly newspaper.  But, our radio station keeps an up-to-the-minute Facebook page that over the last year has become the absolute go-to spot for news, reports, photos, videos and eye witness accounts of even the littlest of local happenings.

We sat in the cellar on Friday night and soon got word via Facebook and text that a tornado had touched down in our town.  The National Weather Service later confirmed that it was an F2 tornado and thanks to Facebook I've seen aerial photographs depicting it's entire treacherous path.

We are fine.  Our community has pulled together and I can gratefully say it too is fine.  No one was injured or killed.  The storm shelters opened by American Red Cross are already closed.  We are a resilient, hard working, little mountain town and are ready for a new day.

And this family is looking forward to a much quieter Friday night this week.

-dana