I'm going to ramble a bit. This may not have a point, but the Axiom community has always been great and I think I need to just babble a little.
It's been a while since my last post, and part of that is due to the fact that I live in Gallatin, Tennessee -- the city that was hit hardest by these tornadoes. I was incredibly lucky: Three streets up from me there are homes that have practically been vaporized. I didn't even lose a shingle. I have my health, my home is safe, my friends are safe, my pets are safe, and I lost nothing. There are an awful lot of people in this town who can't say the same. Nine people in this town have been laid to rest as a result of this tornado, and quite frankly it's incomprehensible to me that the number wasn't higher. I look around this town and I see the scope of the destruction and devastation and I can only marvel at the power of nature. The only thing that kept it from being worse, in my opinion, is that it came through at a little after 2 in the afternoon. If this had happened at 1 in the morning when people weren't at work, this would have been far worse.
Yeah, Gallatin is a 'burb of Nashville, but at the end of the day it's still just a small country town of 60,000. I've lived in the South all of my adult life (and a good deal before that), and I know what Southern storms can be like. They can get unbelievably violent and tornado warnings are just a fact of life, but I think there's a natural tendency to become complacent. Tornado weather has always spooked the hell out of me -- the sky gets green, the air gets heavy and still and you can just feel it. It is a physical, palpable thing in the air, and anyone who lives in tornado-prone areas knows what I'm talking about. But prior to last Friday I'd never witnessed what one is really capable of, and it is terrifying.
There are homes that have just been scraped off the face of the Earth. There were car dealerships that looked like a bomb had gone off two feet away -- cars were piled on top of each other. You know how even in the worst traffic accidents you've ever seen, you can always at least identify what was a car? I saw chunks of metal that were too big to be anything else except a car, but it was impossible to tell. There were enormous trees that had been uprooted and thrown dozens of yards from where they originally stood.
Webster's definition is as follows:
Awe: an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime.
The power of a tornado is truly awesome, and I have a new and profound respect for what they're capable of. If you live in an area where these are occasional threats, please take them seriously. I guarantee that's exactly what I'll be doing from this point forward.
