<

It's a common sound in this part of the world in the springtime, the low rumbling howl of the sirens. Sometimes you have to listen hard to hear them over the roar of the wind and claps of thunder. Other times, they blow when the sky's bright and calm. Only the pale green aura that surrounds everything indicates that it's not a mistake or a test. Those are the worst, because of the reminder of how quickly fate can fall out of the sky and blow lives apart.

A tornado hit Sedalia the spring of 1977 when I was four years old. I'd been excited that day, because Mom had been doing laundry in the basement and she was letting me come downstairs with her to help. When the sirens blew in the middle of the afternoon and she hustled me down the steep wood stairs to the concrete slab basement, I thought it was merely time to put the wet clothes in the dryer again. Instead, she directed me to a concrete-ensconced crawlspace, padded with blankets and pillows that we pulled over our heads.

My dad was a truck driver for a dairy, and he was on the road that day. While my mom and I sat in our cubby, I remember her telling me that we needed to pray for Dad to come home safe. Prayer wasn't a regular event in our house, aside from the usual "now I lay me down to sleep" and "God is great, God is good" childhood graces. Asking God to bring my dad home was new and terrifying.

I remember the roar of the wind, sounding like a giant truck engine surrounding the house. And then silence.

We emerged from the basement and our house was intact. So were the houses surrounding ours. Most of the damage had occured on the northwestern end of town, where the expensive new subdivisions had been built. Houses looked like their lids had been removed like those of tin cans of green beans. Fallen trees blocked the streets, their scattered leaves looking like a green autumn. The old drive-in movie theater was destroyed. The factory where my dad eventually worked for over twenty years was heavily damaged.

I sat in the backseat of my grandma's yellow Volkswagon Beatle, surveying the wreckage of the only place in the world I really knew while my mom and grandma sobbed in the front seat.

We were lucky. Everyone we knew and loved, including my dad, were fine, losing nothing more than some shingles and a few trees. A story floated around for years that a dog in one of the subdivisions was picked up by the storm, which set him down several miles away at the state fairgrounds, where he promptly took a large dump upon terra firma. Whether that really happened or not, I don't know. Sedalia recovered, and has since gone on to survive several other direct twister assaults.

Things are different now. B. and I were shopping when my mom called my cell phone after today's first storm. "Just wanted to catch you before you saw the news and panicked. There was a tornado and everyone's okay."

When we got home a few hours later, the helicopter news footage from Sedalia was already on the local news. I squinted while I watched, trying to see if I recognized any of the destroyed houses. I didn't. During the other storms, my mom and I kept in touch. While they were in the basement without news access, I called with storm updates from the Weather Channel. When we weren't talking, I sat glued to the motion weather maps, watching the giant red splotches of storm as they headed towards Sedalia, grabbing my phone when the spot moved past that dot on the map to make sure they got through it.

I can fill myself with information, presented in an unbiased, non-panicked tidy little animated box. I can plug a zip code into a website and find out exactly where a tornado was spotted minutes earlier, and I can go to a map site and see exactly how far it is from my parents' house, where my baby's trying to sleep. Then I can make a phone call that doesn't require possibly downed lines to make sure everyone's okay the minute it's over. Those endless hours of waiting to see if someone's going to come home have shrunk to seconds. But it doesn't make the fear any less. It just means that I might get hit with unthinkable news faster than we did thirty years ago.

All day I've been thinking about how I hate that Clara Jane's going through these storms, and that she wasn't safe in St. Louis with us. But now, the worst is probably past them. We're the ones who might be facing the same storms, only in the middle of the night. Suddenly, I'm glad she's not here. I'm glad we won't have to wake her at 3 a.m. to make that fast, frantic rush to the basement, half-asleep and bewildered, exhausted from trying to sleep and listen for those sirens at the same time.

I think all of my people in Sedalia have been accounted for, but I'm wondering who was killed, and who's lost. I'm wondering what local sights that I'm so used to seeing have been reduced to haystacks of shattered wood. I'm wondering what we're in for tonight. I'm wondering if Clara Jane was as scared as I was thirty years ago, and if she's wondering when her mom and dad are coming home.