3am Party in the Basement

Sooo... What were you doing at 3am last night? (Watch out. If you say, "sleeping," I may reach through the screen and smack you.) Sleeping was what I so WANTED to be doing. But instead, I was hosting an impromptu party in my basement. Maybe "party" isn't the right word here. Intimate gathering of cold zombies might be more like it.

Shortly before 3am is when I heard the wind begin to blow the trees horizontal out back. I was just about to get out of bed to look out the window, when the tornado sirens went off. Hearing the wind and sirens outside, I wasted no time in getting Dakota, our girls, and our two guests up and herded to the basement. Yep, that's right, we had guests. We like our guests to feel at home when they come, so a middle of the night tour of the dungeon--I mean basement--seemed only fitting.

We listened to the weather beat on things outside for a while, as the voice on the weather radio offered an animated play-by-play commentary of what towns were getting slaughtered. Then we started exchanging "storm stories." I think the one about my mom waking us up in the middle of the night to stack everything in our basement on cans of food took the prize. We happened to have a visitor staying with us that night also. Back in college, a young, male friend of mine, who had been traveling through on his way out west, needed a place to stay the night. I'm not sure if the whole stacking cans thing was some great plan on my mom's part to insure he never came back again or what. If it was, it worked.

In my tiredness, I forgot to share the story that triggered my acute fear of severe storms. One hot August night, again in college, the house I shared with my roommate tried to burn down due to old, bad wiring. While the firefighters investigated and we gathered outside in the middle of a spontaneous block party, an old woman from a few houses up came and talked to me. "See that vacant piece of land over there, between those two houses? There used to be a house there. It got struck by lightning a few years ago and burned to the ground. Now your house is the tallest on the block." I felt as if she were saying, "Yours could be next!" [Cue flash of lightning, ominous thunder and old lady cackling.] Needless to say, I was wide awake for every storm that passed through during my long months in that old house.

Anyway, back to last night. After 30-40 minutes, it sounded like the worst had passed, so we headed back up to our beds. And wouldn't you know it, but no sooner had we put our feet under the covers, when the tornado sirens went off again! But a check of the weather radio and the weather reports on TV didn't indicate there was any real reason for the sirens, so we stayed above ground. And again, a half hour after that, as though someone were getting a bit jumpy at the switch, they went off for a third and final time.

I know it probably goes without saying, but we all slept in this morning. It's funny, I was just commenting to a friend last week that I wondered what it would be like to have kids who sleep past 6:59 in the morning. Today they slept until about 9am. So I guess that's the trick--keep them out late and then wake them up for a while in the middle of the night. Well, we may be on to something. The weather reports are calling for sunny days, but middle of the night storms for the next 4 nights. I REALLY hope none of the night time storms are as severe as last night's. But maybe we should set up an extra mattress in the basement, with a few warm blankets, just in case?