My first Missouri winter was the coldest it’s been in 30 years, according to some reports. Awesome. I now know how to stoke and feed the fire in our wood burning stove. I haven’t started a fire in it yet, but it’s probably not a lot more than the maintaining. I repeat the mantra I was recently taught, “Fire needs three things: air, fuel, and heat.”
I was used to the daily cycle of temperatures in November from 50s to 20s and around again. We survived ten below last month and found out that our road doesn’t get plowed, officially. In Florida I knew to look at a potential property after a storm for flooding, but plowing was an assumption that I made here. The farmer down the road is kind enough to do what he can with a tractor and a plow attachment. I also have snow tires now. (Update: The farmer is probably that nice, but the tractor was officially from the city. That’s how they plow a dirt road. I have a lot to learn.)
I left a hurricane heavy area with home insurance rates that confirmed all the threats and warnings do sometimes come true. After 19 years in South Florida, I’m happy to report that I suffered minimal damage from the actual storms, most was psychological from witnessing public panic and prestorm food shortages in stores to post storm power outages in high temperatures and one time setting an alarm for the middle of the night to get gas from a station where an employee tipped me off about delivery.
Every place has its challenges and I accepted that there is a tornado risk in Missouri. This morning as I went about my routine, an alert blared from my phone that a tornado was headed my way and to take cover. It wasn’t even Spring yet! According to the text of the alert, I had fifteen minutes to shelter (a new verb for me).
I swapped out sandals for sneakers and put on a jacket, not sure if we’d be diving into an old cement, in-ground structure in our yard that we talked about making into a shelter a few months back and hadn’t looked at since.
I took the dog out to pee, because that’s what one does as a deadly storm approaches. I considered what and where my most important papers and possessions were as the dog walked around the yard, happy to be outside in the sunshine. She never did pee.
I ignored my boyfriend who said that the way the skies looked, we were not going to see a tornado and he continued his morning. I had vague memories of these warnings as a kid in upstate New York. I began opening windows so our home wouldn’t get sucked away.
We didn’t have an antenna for local tv news and our Internet was down. I searched on my phone for updates as the minutes ticked by until I found a notice that there was an annual statewide tornado DRILL on this day, at the time my phone went off. Nothing in the alert stated it was a drill.
As I write this, there is a thunking in the yard. My boyfriend told me after looking on his phone that opening windows was a precaution in the past and wouldn’t help. He is out in the yard digging around and looking at how to turn our structure into a shelter. He told me we may be headed into town on this sunny day for a bag of cement mix.