Our Summertime Ritual

There's something about a good thunderstorm. And I don't mean the normal ones that come through often; I mean the ones that set off alarms and put people in their basement and on the phone with relatives. There's something about the imminent danger of something we can't control that makes us human again. It puts our material possessions second and the lives of those around us first. But it's not all fear - there's excitement too. It's the thing that's better than a movie that you can whip out the lemonade and lawn chairs to and just wait...it...out. Because you have no other choice.

The possibility of a tornado during any thunderstorm is pretty old news in Michiana (the home of the infamous Palm Sunday Double Tornado, amongst many others, which was a mile from my home and which my mom was actually in just before her 13th birthday). Every thunderstorm seems to bring the possibility of a tornado, and because the likelihood of another so serious being so close is so slim that every threat brings a little bit of adrenaline with it.

Since I can remember, it's been a summertime ritual to watch the radar and see the clouds form outside. The eeriest sound to me, however, is not the thunder, or the sirens, or even the silenced calm of nature before a tornado, but the voice of the National Weather Service coming through a small speaker in an emergency radio. This to me is the creepiest sound ever for reasons I don't understand. Perhaps it means all other communications are out, or that it's the only thing we can tote to the basement in our frenzy, but it's always the same: everyone is intently focused on that blaring, scraggly, robotic voice that the speakers just can't support, which is inevitably interrupted by a spine-shivering siren that raises its pitch over and over, and anyone who speaks over this is shushed because everyone else wants to know what's happening where we can't and shouldn't go.