Twister down
Washed blue skies send the younglings outdoors into flips on the trampoline... a bag of Korean fried chicken Lay's in Patience's hands and Yali is soaked from the garden hose...
They also want to scooter around the neighborhood with me because Patience is proudly “done with school by 10:03!” so we have time... they pull out the old scooters looking crusted over like some barnacled ship's debris after two hundred years on the sea floor... they coast down the sidewalk together... green oak leaves waving in the skull of Yali's bike helmet like a flag as he arabesques across an intersection one leg extended behind him in the air... “I feel like Uncle Elmer” he notes proudly... remembering how Elmer struck a similar pose on the back of Francis' 80 year-old tractor Sunday afternoon as it crawled across the yard... sometime later he finds a very dried and very worm-eaten fir branch which he drags behind him part of the way home for some project...
Storms are coming though so we don't stay out past lunch... heat building under still cloudless sky... wind increasing...
Puck takes a call from his recruiter at noon... rushes into my room for his social security card... “I need it quick!” he urges... gets his ASVAB test scheduled...
Then he and Oxbear leave to deal with paperwork for the Jag and to grab a new ATM card from the bank...
It's less than an hour later and the sky is no longer blue... pull up the play-by-play weather analysis online as Yali helps gather used towels while I grab floor mats and door mats... slap them all over the exposed glass of my car as Scott Connell of Channel 5 touts predicted sizes of hail up to three and a half inches in some places just west... birds singing in the wind...
Oxbear and Puck are at the bank in Clayton... “How's it looking?” Oxbear texts... advise them to stay where they are as nickle-sized hail begins to rattle into the lawn... they remain in the parking garage... as sirens begin screaming they drive down a level while I send the kids downstairs...
Must have been minutes later that a tornado whips through the downtown Clayton area where Oxbear and Puck are still submerged in the bank parking garage...
It's some short time later that – not realizing the extensive damage – in the golden sunshine of the passed storm Patience and I leave for her private lesson at the studio... snarled traffic... sirens from every possible first responder vehicle... roads blocked... debris and cracked trees...
Back home by five-thirty where Puck is leaving for his buddy J's in the next county...
...as the mayor of St. Louis pleads for people to stay off the road and off their phones...
...and Sally arrives from work as we watch and discuss damage over risotto bites and root beer and later a viewing of 1956's “The Bad Seed”...