My First Tornado

There I was, sleeping peacefully, when I heard a loud banging noise that woke me up. I could tell from the vague light coming around the closed blinds that it was early, and I wondered what had woken me up. I sat up on my bed (which is actually just a mattress on the floor) and peered through the blinds behind me at a big, dim, avocado green sky. Hmm, storm, I thought in my barely-awake capacity to think. Maybe I won't go to church. The thought of laying in bed late listening to the rain sounded great and I snuggled back down under the covers. Less than five minutes later I had already drifted back to sleep when I thought I heard the rain starting, only it didn't sound quite right. It sounded like the house was in a car wash and I could hear branches banging on my wall. There aren't any trees close enough to bang on my wall and this was weird enough to wake me back up, when the plastic over my other bedroom window that faces the street started to whip in and out like it was going to explode at any moment. Hurricane? I thought in my grogginess and jumped up to move the african violets off the desk in front of the window so that they wouldn't get thrown all over the room when the window broke, as I felt sure it would. I pulled the blinds aside and didn't have any time at all to adjust to what I saw as the trees around my house were bent as far as they would go - I could see branches and trees falling over and my eyes clamped onto my car in the street, waiting to watch it roll over or be smashed. The air was full of rain and debris and just to the left of my car the debris in the street whipped around in a swirl, moving down the street from my left to my right. I couldn't see a funnel, just the swirling debris moving closer to my car. Tornado, I finally realized. I should go to the basement. I should RUN to the basement. But I was fixated and didn't move until the final swirl of gust that felt like it would blow our house away forever, at which point I ducked under the desk. My heart was going at a rate I never seem to attain in cardio workouts and I honestly could not move from that spot. And then it was suddenly gone.
It wasn't until then that I heard the sirens and simultaniously heard my frantic downstairs neighbor Skyla come pounding up the stairs to wake us upstairs people up. We all piled downstairs but we knew it was already gone, it was so dead quiet now. The whole thing may have lasted thirty seconds. Slowly we emerged out onto the porch and then out into the street as our neighbors did the same. Pajama-clad people full of adrenalin looked at each other in disbelief. "Was that a tornado?" The nose-ringed man in blue plaid asked us. Yes. We saw it, we said, although not sure that we really did.
Over the next couple of hours our little part of town became a huge block party of the disoriented but grateful masses. No one was hurt, and the damage didn't actually seem too bad. A few broken windows here and there, a lot of trees down, many many cars damaged by winds and branches, but houses were still standing and generally speaking nothing too extreme had happened. One woman found her neighbor's propane grill in her tree, and a man on the next block over from me had all four of his vehicles completely crushed by two different trees. As we walked around the neighborhood only one house was missing its roof, and his neighbor told me it had landed on HIS house and his chimney was gone. "We can't find our chimney" he told me.
I have to say, I feel terrible for the people who have damage to their property, but part of me feels elated. I've dreamed about tornados since I was a little kid, but never did I expect to glide through it without anything really happening. My neighbors and Dan and I came back to my house and all made breakfast together - the first time we've all done something together. It felt like a weird slumber party.
They say that the KU campus has a lot of damage, and Nate's dad lost two of his huge trees. There are power lines across sidewalks and streets that have sparked a few fires, and we're still in a tornado warning, so I guess it's not over yet.
I just heard on the radio that Lawrence has been declared a disaster area. Wow.