That could’ve been my family: Recalling tornado experience

The sun is shining, the birds are chirping; everything’s great.

Then two or three massive F3 tornadoes rip through the town you’re visiting and suddenly the whole world is turned upside down. Literally.

We rolled out of bed Friday morning on Feb. 2 at my parents-in-laws’ winter home in The Villages, Fla., a retirement community of about 65,000 residents in central Florida, to witness destruction like I had never seen before.

A not-so-subtle message that when humankind thinks it has all the answers and is in charge of this world of ours, we must be reminded otherwise.

Mother Nature’s wrath was especially apparent to me before the word tornado even entered my head that night. The lightning was generating so much electricity I couldn’t turn my brain off and go to sleep. So I decided to take a short walk to get some fresh air and get some nervous energy out, even though it was storming; that is, until I opened their front door and saw rain coming sideways. Then a cow, also flying in sideways.

I closed the door and went back inside.

It seemed like the smart thing to do.

Soon after I was seated on the couch watching late-night television at its very worst, when a weather warning came across the screen; you know the ones that usually forecast snow for pretty much all of southern Quebec. This one was a little different, though.

‘Tornado warning in effect. . .’

That was odd. Soon after, my daughter woke up and got out of bed, looking for daddy. I picked her up, helped her back into bed, and finally dozed off myself about 2:30 a.m.

The next morning, we awoke to the kind of scene I had only ever glimpsed in the movies.

Enormous trees were bent at 90-degree angles, entire houses were flattened, emptied and filled again by debris. Cars overturned.

Twenty people were dead. I didn’t know any of them, but I felt for them. That could’ve been my family. Hundreds of people nursed injuries ranging from critical to minor and more than a thousand homes were damaged.

The sun sort of stayed away for a few days after that — appropriately, I thought. The grey days seemed like a reminder of the bleakness cast over so many other families. I couldn’t really complain about the cool temperatures we encountered in following days, because however cold it was, it was still better than three tornadoes. Another walk around the affected area — about a half mile from the front door of my in-laws’ home - on Saturday showed families picking up the pieces and blue tarps going up over the roofs of homes that had been damaged. The tarps seemed to go on forever.

The randomness of tornadoes means that very easily could have been my family picking up the pieces and figuring out what to do next, and it made me appreciate our good fortune that much more.

It also made me appreciate the following piece of advice that much more: Don’t mess with Mother Nature.