Tornadoes on the prowl

This autumn has been so beautiful with little rain and lots of sunshine.  I love it, but last night realized there was a price to pay for this extended comfort.  A huge band of storm conditions ripe for tornadoes was moving across the nation and was still alive and threatening as it approached Virginia. Our house sits a ways up the mountain and is surrounded by hundreds of very big trees which we enjoy watching through our very big windows.  As the evening wore on, and the hazardous trailers kept crawling across the  TV screen, we kept opening the doors to the deck to test the atmosphere.  This started out to be mostly idle curiosity but by midnight I started saying things like "should we sleep downstairs?" "Should we be prepared to go to the storeroom under the steps if the weather gets weird?" "Let's take a big quilt and some pillows with us and a flashlight and some water and a radio, and, and, and..."  The TV warnings got more serious and we stood to watch exactly what the storm was doing, only to discover that it had skipped right over us and was already well to the east, having only dropped a little rain.  I went to bed in my usual place, Bill went downstairs alone.  I slept right through a heavy 4:30 a.m. rainstorm Bill told me about. Today we heard a man in a small town describe all the damage done to his place. He said the whole thing took only 30 seconds.  That's just about how long it would take to jump out of our downstairs bed, if fully awake, and make it across the hall to the partially underground storeroom under our steps.  If we have to get serious about tornado protection next time, we had better stock all those supplies first and just go ahead and sleep in there on the air mattress.