Tornado Outbreak.

The above is what we saw. Here is what Raleigh and folks down east saw. A neighbor down the street called it hours before it happened, during our long morning of odd light and hard wind. She grew up in Alabama and Tennessee, where things like this are a little more common. I only knew something wasn't right. She knew what kind of something.

It rained as hard as it can rain here, but that was about it. Tornadoes immediately south and immediately north and immediately east. Van Denton, doing the live play-by-play on WGHP, cried on-air as a storm came through High Point. It is never going to be good when the weatherman doesn't know what to do. I think he saw the radar and thought we were getting what Raleigh eventually got. Sixty tornadoes statewide, the national news says this morning. We made the national news. The sun came out twenty minutes after it quit raining. We had huge wind all afternoon, too, in all that sun. I want to have other things to say about this, but all those pictures of insulation in the trees— We were lucky. No way around it. Other folks were not.

Be careful out there, friends and fans of weather. Cultivate a healthy respect. Keep an eye always, always to the western sky, even on a scraped-clean bone-still day like this one.