Senior Moments: A twister gets too close for comfort

“Get in the closet now!” Sara screamed at me, “We just got a tornado alert.”

I was resting in bed recovering from a bad cold when she burst into my bedroom. I didn’t even grasp what she was saying until she handed me my cane and ushered me into my long narrow walk-in closet.

“Wait, you’ll need a chair,” she said dragging one across the room. “We may be in here for a while,” She sat me in the chair closest to the closet door and huddled on the floor next to my favorite pair of high heels which I realized I might not be wearing again.

“We have 12 minutes,” my daughter announced reading the alerts as they came in on her phone.

It hit us both at the same time. The closet has a window. I was sitting beneath it. All the rooms and closets in my house have windows, something that attracted me to the house initially since I am claustrophobic. Now it didn’t seem like such a great idea.

“Hall,” we shouted in unison, collapsing into nervous laughter. Moments later we were slamming doors to the rooms that connected to the long narrow hallway turning it into a windowless retreat. I looked longingly at the bathroom door. “Don’t even think about it,” Sara said imploring me not to open any doors until the alert was over, or the tornado hit, whichever came first.

Neither of us had ever been in a tornado, not that it kept us from quickly deciding we were experts on how to stay safe. I decided exercise was my key to salvation.

“I guess I can take my walk now,” I said thinking about my physical therapist’s pronouncement that twice daily walks were vital to the recovery from my fall. Days of relentless rain had kept me inside where I started doing laps in the hallway.

“Yes,” moving is good,” Sara offered from her motionless seat on the floor. Six minutes left to go. The tornado was two towns away from us, according to the latest alert.

We looked at each other and fell into that inappropriate laughter my family is known for.

“How could we have possibly taken shelter in a closet with a window?”

We spent the remaining minutes laughing, albeit nervously, until the news came. The tornado had dissipated before touching down. We were safe.

“We handled that well, didn’t we?” I said to my already laughing daughter.

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