speechless

I just read my last post and felt like I had swallowed my heart. I told myself when school was out I would post pictures of mother's day fun and Alina's dance recital and I had forgotten about mentioning the tornadoes in the South. And how that doesn't happen here. Oh. How wrong I was.

I won't say I never knew it could happen, I remember an F5 tornado that hit Oklahoma City years ago and people saying, basement or not, with winds that powerful (over 200 mph!!) there is nothing you can do to save yourself in some situations.

We'd been having a lot of rain. Troy was miserable with allergies. A family friend was graduating high school in Girard and I was planning for the girls and I to go to her party at her house about 5:30. I went to Arcadia to get Alina from Grandma Helen's and when I got there Alina said "Did you just hear thunder?" I said, "I don't think there are predictions for thunder storms this evening, Alina."

We stopped at the Dollar General store on the way home and the lady working there was on break and outside smoking. She said to us "Is this humidity just killing you?" And I hadn't even noticed the humidity being unusually high. While we were in the store, that awful buzzing/ringing sound that the radio does for storm warnings was playing on the store radio. Alina reached over to me to stop and listen- strong storm about an hour to the west of us, moving about 60 mph, possibility of large hail and damaging winds. So I said "I guess we better get home."

By the time we got home, the tornado sirens were going off in Pittsburg, which made me mad. I had been listening to the radio and I knew the threat was more to the south and east of us by then than Pittsburg. So I wasn't going to take cover. I made dinner for Troy, who was too miserable to go to the graduation party with us, and waited for the worst of the storm to blow over us. It wasn't bad at all. I was hearing on the news that there was a tornado on the ground in Joplin and felt confident that it had moved out of our area. The girls and I took off for Girard.

I figure the tornado was doing it's devastation in Joplin as we were on our way to Girard. We were eating and laughing when Hank, who's family business owns a store in Joplin, received a call that their store sustained minimal damage but that others had been badly damaged. That's all I knew. We joked about it even. It wasn't until much later that evening, after returning home and then out to Helen's again with Troy, that Helen mentioned that St. John's hospital was badly damaged. I thought of my sister's good friend who works there and called Susan to see if she'd talked to her. She said she had, her friend was safe but that several people were not. I said "Oh, I was really hoping there were no fatalities." She hesitated, then said "Oh.........there are fatalities. Go home and look on the internet."

And then I came home and saw pictures on the internet. Un.Believable.

Today, almost one week later, the official death toll is 142 with 105 still unaccounted for. 

And again, I am shocked and saddened.