Twister: Tornado Stories

Reader Contribution by Shirley "rodeo" Landis Vanscoyk
Published on July 27, 2010
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I’ve never been to Kansas. No skinny legs have ever shriveled up beneath my house. Okay, okay, we do have our share of little people here in the township, but that is a story for another time.

But, I would just like to declare to those in charge ENOUGH WITH THE TORNADOES!

A long long time ago, I was a twenty year old Pennsylvania girl transplanted to an army base a little north of Nashville, Tennessee. I had a brand new baby, two weeks old, and a pilot husband on active duty with the 101st Airborne. He was never home, especially during bad weather, which I was to learn over my three year stay there, occurred every afternoon from April through October.

I got used to the sky turning greenish black in seconds. After you have been warned tornadoes are on the ground about five hundred times, sometimes three or four times a day, you kind of get complacent. Get a “I’m gonna wait to panic til I see the actual funnel cloud” attitude. Until the day you do.

I was in my living room on an afternoon late in May. It was hot. It was humid. My baby son was asleep naked in his playpen. I remember his precious little head looked like a slightly damp egg. I didn’t turn on the tv or radio, or play any music for fear of waking him up. We were still getting to know each other. Later I would learn he actually slept better with background noise.

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