scary sky

Unless you live under a rock, you already know about the tornadoes that hit southwestern/central Massachusetts yesterday. What you might not know is that this all happened alarmingly close to where we live, just a few miles north of here. We got off lucky, about a minute and a half of rain and some gusty winds were all we saw, but we have family and friends that live in the areas hit, which made for a scary afternoon. So far everyone we've been able to get in touch with are fine, although we're anxiously waiting to hear back from one friend in an area that was hit pretty hard.

It's all very weird for New England -- we get an occasional twister that will touch down and take off someone's roof or knock down a few trees, but to have a path of destruction that stretches across 30 or 40 miles by a really large tornado is just outside of our historical knowledge.

Last time there was a big tornado was back when I was a kid. A large tornado hit the Windsor Locks, CT, area and traveled northward for about 15 or 20 miles, affecting areas not far from our house. After all the excitement of yesterday afternoon, I told the kids this morning how my Dad, my brother and I went out looking for debris the following day. We actually found paperwork and other debris from the Air Museum in Windsor Locks, a good 25 miles away.

So of course the kids insisted on taking a walk to see what we might be able to find near our house:

Most of what we found were plastic sheeting and other chunks of building materials that most likely originated locally. (And of course, a lot of leaves and branches.) But J was excited about a piece of play money he found. Logically, that's probably also a local find, but we had fun guessing all the different places it might have come from. Like the elementary school behind my parent's house whose roof was ripped off. Or maybe one of the collapsed houses in Springfield that we saw pictures of on the news.

It made for an interesting twist -- pun fully intended -- on our morning walk. I'm just grateful that that's all the effects we saw from the storms.