24 hours...

Tonight in the greater Little Rock area, the big news is that there was a tornado last night. The bigger news in this part of town is that it came through our neighborhood.

I'm happy to say that we, along with all of our loved ones, are all safe and sound, and our house has sustained no damage. A few blocks away and it's a different story. There were trees down all through our neighborhood and many of the streets were not passable this morning.

This is what it looked like throughout the much of my neighborhood. I'm not sure exactly where this was taken, but this is what much of the neighborhood looked like when I went out for coffee this morning. (Power was out and I needed my caffeine! Apparently half of Little Rock had the same idea, cause you wouldn't believe the lines!)

My mother-in-law lives just 5 blocks away and she ended up with a tree across her driveway, a busted skylight, a collapsed lean to and back porch, and a bicycle planted on top of her roof. Next door to her, my 93-year-old grandmother was home when the tornado passed over her house. A large tree very narrowly missed her house and the glass of her patio doors was broken. She rode out the storm in a chair in the bathtub, with a pillow placed around her head. Her garden shed was thrown against her house her house, an transformer came down into her backyard, and my trampoline from my mother-in-law's house ended up over the fence in my grandmother's yard. Across the street, we found the glass garden globe that had been in her front yard. It was strangely unbroken.

It took until 6:00 tonight to get power back, so I spent much of the day hanging out with my sister, my dad, or my mom. Generally, I was a ho for anyone with electricity running to their house. Tonight, the heat is on and I sit in my warm house and I'm typing this blog post, and it's hard to believe that last night was truly less than 24 hours ago. And, but for the storm tracking a few city blocks our direction, how many other possible endings there could have been for that evening.

We have much to be thankful for.