Blog

Ooo… ominous! This reminds me so much of one of the most haunting experiences from my childhood in the South.

Imagine getting on a school bus just as the sun is coming up. There’s still dew on the ground and not a cloud in the sky as the rickety, faded-yellow machine careens down dirt roads. The windows rattle incessantly and make it impossible to carry on a conversation. But no one is talking anyway. We’re staring out into the fenced pastures that hug the road. The livestock is huddled in the corners of their pens. All of them. Birds are rocketing past the grill of the bus like tiny, feathered kamikazes.

This is what the morning before a tornado is like. The older kids teach the signs to the younger ones. They talk about how the animals know it before anyone else and without fail, they’re right. The brooding anvil-head would start building itself by noon and all of us would be pressed together in the core-most hallways of our school by 3pm–just like the cowering livestock beyond our rattling bus windows.

Well done, J3. 😉

Yeah, animals always seem to know before people, same thing happens with earthquakes from what I understand. Fortunately we live where we don’t have to worry about that sort of thing too much. Just the occasional heavy thunderstorm.