Morning After.

Tree damage everywhere, litter in the streets, roofs blown mainly off on the way to the puppet show—that might have been the best storm since the hail fiasco of May 2008, when all of everything got cut to pieces. There was also the December 2003 ice storm, which was when I first lived in this neighborhood, and when I last saw this many tree limbs in the streets. There was also the Friendly Avenue gustnado of 1999. And we were lucky last night. Folks all over everywhere else around here got a lot worse.

I went to bed thinking the radar was saying we were fine, and then 3 a.m. turned up with continuous lighting and what my neighbor is saying were 85 mph winds, and though I'm not quite ready to trust that, let's certainly say we saw something close to that throughout the 2740X storming area, and almost surely they saw it in full force down Wendover out east of town, where this evening back home from the puppet show there were still traffic lights out, still roofing materials in the road. Trees blown right down in the medians. Siding off the houses. That was a storm. I got up to see if we needed to be in the basement, and by the time Lanie Pope over at WXII—still at work at 3 a.m.—was telling us there seemed to be a tornado on the ground in Sunset Hills, which is only a gearshift or two away from the Forecast HQ, the wind had died down here, the dogwood was still standing, and I went back to bed. I only got good and scared after it was already over. And that was only for the Toad, who never once stirred.

To learn to love a storm that could take the wee boy out: I'll need another couple go-arounds before I settle back in, I think, before it feels like it used to feel. Before, it was just me. Now it's this dead-to-the-world sleeping boy who does not yet need to have a maple limb come through his ceiling. That gets plenty good later on, some time in his tenth or eleventh year, when it might be astonishing instead of petrifying. For now, he's sleeping again, having been this morning backpacked through the aftermath of whatever the hell that was, resting his one hand on my shoulder and making his small noises that surely, surely must mean something, must mean astonishment of some sort or kind.