Tornadoes are terrifying even in passing. Close calls really stick with you though. It's no wonder you had nightmares about them if you had repeated near events. I certainly have had nightmares about tornadoes. Strangely, I've never had a nightmare about my one really close call.

When I was a small child, my Gran and I were headed downtown for shopping and lunch, along Murchison road when a tornado was passing overhead. We saw a cinderblock structure picked up from behind a house, roiling and breaking up above us as it flew across the street and landed in the backyard of another house. The two houses were untouched.

I remember the sun was shining when we left home. Then, it got cloudy and there was a driving torrential rain that stopped as suddenly as it had started. I remember that after the rain, it got as dark as bedtime. I remember the cinderblocks flying overhead. I remember the lurch of the car as Gran floored it, and the relief when we got into a building downtown and started down the stairs to the basement.

To give you an idea of how dark it got… I stayed with Gran every summer growing up. When I was small, bedtime was 8:30pm.

I don't recall the reporting on the storm. But, from that same storm, the evening news reported that a mother and daughter who'd been walking when the storm hit were killed. One of the women's bodies was wedged into a tree where the tornado had flung her in a branching and split the tree nearly to the roots. The other was driven "like a straw through jello" (Gran's words) into the side of building. There was no blood or gore, and the bodies showed no obvious injuries.