Mother Nature showed her beauty and serenity by delivering a pretty white snow on Christmas Eve. A week later, she showed her fury.
The Reid household is composed of a child of the Midwest who is married to a woman from Kansas. Thunderstorms and tornado watches do not frighten us.
New Year’s morning was no different. As the tornado sirens wailed, we prepared to go down to our basement to ride out the storm. Our daughters, 9 and 11 years old, took their computers with them and weren't the least bit afraid. I brewed coffee first. My wife, Carmen, and I actually waited for the worst of the storm to hit before joining our daughters. But the front moved through and we remained at our front door.
No high wind. No driving rain. No hail.
We felt a bit cheated.
I called downstairs to the girls to tell them the front had passed and they could come up. You could hear the disappointment in their voices.
We live about a mile from Watson Road in Crestwood. We’re less then two miles from Sunset Hills. We should have had our lucky rear ends in that basement. We were blessed, just as the St. Louis area was that no one was killed last Friday.
We began 2011 under some kind of lucky star.
