After yesterday morning’s chipmunk incident, I was expecting an exponentially less crazy morning. Alas, I was wrong. [By the way, I've got dibs on "Chipmunk Incident" as a band name.]
It poured last night again. Are you getting tired of hearing about the rain? Me too. But this is relevant to the story, I promise. So anyway, it poured last night, but by the time I got up, it was waning and around 8:00 it was even sunny. I was on the verge of getting ready to teach water aerobics when the sky suddenly got dark. Very dark. By 8:30, there was thunder, so I canceled class. And it just kept getting darker. I was cleaning up the kitchen at 9 a.m. when the tornado siren started going off.
“What’s that?” AJ asked.
“The tornado siren,” I carelessly said. Dumb move. You don’t want to mention tornados to AJ. He knows far too much about them. He doesn’t like storms in general. When the thundering started earlier, he barricaded himself in his room with all the windows shut and the blinds and curtains drawn. It was about 150 degrees in there.
“Does that mean there’s a tornado?” he asked, sounding panicked.
“No,” I lied, “it just means there’s a bad storm. But we should go down in the basement to be safe.”
I sent him downstairs while I shut all the windows, but he was nervous and kept running up and down the stairs to see if I was coming yet. There storm rumbled and crackled through. Twenty minutes later, we got the all-clear. AJ, finally releasing all his nerves, began talking very loudly and very fast about what had probably happened — what kind of cloud and wind formations there were, how tornados were highly unlikely in our hilly neighborhood, etc. Poor kid.
Now The Boy Across the Street is over and they are on the verge of tearing the place apart, having been cooped up indoors all morning, and are likely to be all day. The thunder is still rumbling and the rain is still falling and the storms are still coming. Next up on this morning’s storm agenda, hail! The size of golf-balls, they say. Whoopee! What’s on for the afternoon? Frogs? Fire and Brimstone? Maybe the insurance company will buy me that new roof after all.
Posted by harri3tspy 
