So we experienced our first Tornado Watch (I know, only a watch) here in Tennessee. Well, actually Eric did. I experienced a tornado warning when I lived at the tip of Southern Illinois, about 30 mins. from Paducah, Kentucky. The tornado was right above me. I’ll never forget it. You could not see anything out the windows and I was huddled under a desk with my mother on the other line back in New Hampshire (that was way before cell phones). And I don’t know if I was living exactly 30 minutes from Paducah—I simply love saying Paducah, Kentucky at every opportunity, ever since I lived in Southern Illinois as a naive college student.
Paducah… Eric and I actually checked out the town and neighborhood last year when we decided we wanted to move south. They have a great artist relocation program that we were considering. Then we found this place…
I’m off on a tangent. So we’re here in our new home down south, listening to the local news reporting a severe storm in middle Tennessee, which also happens to be heading our way, and looked outside and saw these peculiar clouds descending downward and forming an ominous, tidal-wave-type shape. We haven’t seen anything like it before (at least what we can remember).
I know I cannot capture the activity the clouds were creating in a couple pics but in the above image, while the clouds were creating a “wall” and swooping down behind the trees beyond our property line, I could see Van Gogh, a fish and my old dog Oliver in the formations. Call me crazy, but it’s what I saw. And you can also see the “tidal wave” taking shape as it started to “swoop” around. And the sun behind the clouds was as if there was a lit lantern behind a bundle of bleached gauze.
And then it started moving East and the bright blue sky was coming back. But what’s most peculiar is that minutes before these crazy, dark clouds came upon us, we were snapping photos of a double rainbow! Calm before the storm I guess.