Severe Threat.

Maybe it's the Toad and my new aversion to things that endanger Toads, or maybe it's the horror that is the photography coming out of Missouri, out of Kansas, out of Texas, out of Oklahoma, out of Alabama, out of what seems like another new town every day, but I am not loving the clear-skied wind we're picking up out front what's back west, and I am not loving the look of what's back west, either. We are, here on the Piedmont, mainly sheltered from the apocalyptic storms they've seen in Tuscaloosa and Joplin and everywhere all else across the center of the country, and so my level of nervousness is more like the systemic hum we've been picking up off the damaged air handler atop the SECU building four blocks up the hill than like the tornado sirens they keep having to ring back west, but still. You see those pictures and you wonder if even a good basement would have saved you. My god those people. My god this violent spring. We had a coneflower bloom out front in our ninety-degree heat today and that thing seemed impossible compared to the barkless trees in Missouri.

When I drove out west, the gas stations advertised deals for weather radios on the moveable-letter signs. We do not have that here. The Appalachians shield us. Nothing has five or ten hours on the ground to spin itself together. Out there, there's nothing. There are the Rockies and then there are beanfields, wheatfields, cornfields.

The dog is not right. She keeps wanting under tables, wanting to be pressed up against my leg.

Maybe it will be nothing. Probably, even. But this is the weather we've all seen this spring, and there it is on the radar, and out the kitchen windows in the full eight o'clock light of late, late spring, the leaves are doing odd things, are turning inside out, and that wind is more than we're used to. You want to say a stupid thing like I should have mowed the lawn. Instead, you console the dog and pour a short drink and stand out on the back deck and look west at the sky like it might tell you something, like that might tell you how ready you ought to be. As if, the pictures tell us, there's anything like ready.