It felt like Deja Vu....

A year ago on May 8th, my town experienced some pretty major thunderstorms that spawned several tornadoes. One tornado happened to touch down and sweep through an area that was within a mile or so from my house. I remember that night so well.

The storms began rolling in around supper time, and progressively got worse, with major lightning and thunder, and very heavy rains. It was bad enough that we began unplugging various appliances, and began to get in our "safe zone" of the house. Buddy turned on his fire department radios (he's an engineer, so he has officer radios that can listen to all information coming out of the control center.) We were able to hear both counties that we serve, as we live very close to the county line. We could tell by the type and frequency of calls coming in that the storms were getting closer to us. I was sitting in the hallway with Tillman (our dog) and Quinn, who was one day away from being four months old. Luckily for me, Quinn did a great job of sleeping.

Then we heard a call come in for our station that was only a mile from our house, and the information we heard let us know that the storm was REALLY bad. Buddy took off to help, and ushered Quinn, Tillman and I into the walk-in closet in our bedroom and handed us a flashlight. Good thing too because a few minutes later, the power went out. This meant our phone wouldn't work. I reached for my cell phone, only to see that the battery was dying. Then the storm hit. I could hear the rain pounding on the roof. I heard the clicking sound of hailstones hitting the windows and walls. I heard thunder, saw lightning, and heard crazy wind. I just prayed that the Lord would keep us safe.

Buddy, meanwhile, was sitting in the fire truck on the scene, when the tornado actually went past him. He said it DOES sound like a freight train. The tornado destroyed several homes in one neighborhood of our fire district, but we only lost a few limbs from the trees. God kept us safe!

So you can only imagine what went through my mind when the meteorologist on the news started describing similar situations were heading towards my area again last night! Luckily last night's storms ended up being nothing compared to what we went through last year. But, it sure did feel like deja vu!!