Tornadoes and Drake

After looking at the title, many of you are asking yourself, "Who is Drake?" Well, Drake is our neighbor's dog. The same neighbor who we rent our house from and hang out with all the time. Drake has been and continues to be our overnight guest. Our neighbor is an avid duck hunter and we have kept Drake overnight so he can hunt at a place in Arkansas. Drake is a 14 year old lab and really doesn't do a whole lot. He is the easiest dog to keep since he doesn't do anything. He just follows me around the house wherever I go, even if I leave the room for one minute. He is a pretty noisy sleeper. He sleeps on the floor at the foot of our bed and has some wild dreams. I wonder what he is chasing. We are keeping Drake while our neighbor is skiing in Colorado for a couple of days. We love Drake!! Here is a little photo:


Isn't he cute?? This is the face he gives me when I'm in the kitchen and he wants something to eat.

You may be asking how Drake and tornadoes go together, well hold on here comes the story...

Yesterday we knew there would be some thunderstorms. It was 70 degrees and a cold front was moving in. I've been in some pretty bad thunderstorms and so wasn't really nervous. I just went about my day. My biggest concern was trying to get a run in before the storms arrived. ADB and I had just changed to go running and stepped out the front door when we saw lightening. There went that. Back inside we go. We had our screen door of the sliding glass door open. It was such a warm day especially in February. It has a little dog door on it. Drake hadn't been using it and we would yell at him if he even got near it.

So, there we are at our little abode. Andy is on the phone and I'm doing some stuff for this other part time job I have. The storm is building a bit now and there is rain and wind along with the thunder and lightening. We call Drake just to make sure he is okay. I mean the lightening was pretty fierce. No Drake. What are you kidding? Where is Drake? Now Drake has a history of straying off, but that is only when he is outside without a leash. Then it dawns on us...the dog door. We contemplate for a minute. What do we do? Drake's not our dog, but what if something happens to him? What will we tell our neighbor? So, ADB decides to do a little search around the homes around us. I wasn't sure about this...risking his life for a dog. My options...dog or husband. I mean I love dogs, but not more than my husband. The good news is after a few minutes Drake and ADB come in the door. Yeah, all is well.

Then, all of a sudden we start to hear what sounded like the Speculator fire siren. We do have a fire/emergency station down the road from us and so we hear the sirens all the time...(not to mention the train whistle that blows as well). But this one was a little different and it kept going and didn't stop. I asked Andy what it was and he said...a tornado siren. I started to get nervous and tried to remember what they told us in grade school about what to do during tornadoes. All I could remember was from Wilderness First Aid training at Tapawingo. Go to the nearest ditch and lay on the ground with your hands over your head. This sounded a little absurd since we were in a house. So, instead of doing what we should have (go in the closet and put pillows and blankets over us or get in the bathtub and put a mattress over us) we just looked out the window a lot to see what everyone else was doing and ate dinner. We probably should have gone into some inner rooom of the house, but instead sat in front of our sliding glass door (which was now shut in case Drake tried to escape again and because of the wind) and watched it all.

We were in awe. Probably not the smartest thing, but I've never been in a tornado path before. The siren kept going off. What a scary sound. We hadn't turned on the TV yet to see what was going on. It really didn't cross our mind to check on TV. We thought everything would be shut down anyway with the tornado siren going off. After the first wave of storms went throught, we turned on the TV to see what to expect next. Another band of storms was coming through. The siren went off again around 9:30pm. I was more scared at the night storm because you can't see anything except for the amazing lightening. These big storms always remind me of the Lord and his power. To think at a word the Lord could calm the storm. Amazing.

The guy on the TV even quoted some scripture in Nahum about storms. How the Lord is in control over the storms. I didn't think you were able to do that. I guess things are different here in the South. We didn't experience any damage, but areas around us were hit pretty hard. A mall was damaged pretty bad near us. There was a tornado that did hit down in Memphis, but not in our area of town. We got lots of rain, thunder and lightening and wind.

So we are fine. Another event where we say "Welcome to Memphis!"