Fire up the Searchlights: Blah Blah Blahg Premiere

This is my first attempt at a blog. But there is one overarching question I have about this blogging business: who on earth really cares about what I have to say? Having blogged that, I read other people's blogs with great interest! (Rock on, Casey & Dakota!) They have lives and children and unique perspectives. I have a job, lots of dogs, and have turned into my mother.

So what's going on today? Well, the weather is extremely bizarre. Two weeks before Christmas, and the temps are warm and the skies are creepily stormy, with the forecast of possible severe weather this afternoon. Thanks, God, but we really do not need any more tornadoes this year. To go outside is to feel that prickly unsettled warmth that precedes a bad storm. I don't like it.

Though I've never been through a tornado (thank you also, God, for that blessing), I've seen the devastation and witnessed the depths of loss, as the winds destroy a lifetime's worth of possessions and memories...and all too often, life itself. As a TV reporter in Wilmington, NC, in the mid-80s, I was part of a team covering the aftermath of a band of tornadoes that tore a swath through eastern NC. The devastation was jaw-dropping. Farms and fields were soaking wet and littered with the oddest of things: a child's shoe--just one; a wet sheet of loose-leaf paper with a penciled homework assignment; a broken mixing bowl; a car seat; a guillotine-like piece of sheet metal from the soup processing factory close by. Shreds of fiberglass insulation and split lumber were everywhere downwind of what used to be neighborhoods. The air smelled of fresh lumber from broken houses and stately pine forests 1/3 of a mile wide, reduced to sticks and mulch. The families who lost everything picked through the piles of debris that used to be home, looking for a connection to the way things used to be, before the storm. Of all the possessions in a household, the most sought after are always the photographs: Everything else can be replaced. Almost everything.

When the TV cameras roll, brave firemen, paramedics, and law enforcement officers told the story in the usual factual, cut-and-dried way. But when they got to the part about finding the body of an infant in a tree, the horror of the day manifested itself in tears and sobs. Fifty seven people in SC and NC died from the band of tornadoes on March 28, 1984. Except for the tiniest, each one went to bed with some sort of plan for the following day. And we can only pray that they never knew what hit them.

Yikes! That's a negative way to start off my blogging career! But it's a good thing to turn negative thoughts into positive energy: Maybe this is one more reminder to count our blessings daily, and to never let a day go by without holding our loved ones close.