If you tl;dr at this, you are missing out. Even if it takes time, read through it. It's worth your while.

On Sunday night, we (me and my parents) were staying at our house. I'd just found a Bond marathon on BBC America, and just finished off a bag of popcorn with my dad when it started to rain. No worries, right? Well, my mom brought in her laptop and plopped it down on her lap. We knew it was going to rain, but she wanted to check the weather online just in case. When she got on, lightning started and we could hear wind whipping around outside. Still, no worries, right? Just a regular thunderstorm.

My mom saw a fast-approaching cell of heavy rain online, so my dad decides, as a simple precautionary measure, to go downstairs to our basement. No sooner had we gotten down there and put our stuff down than the lights flickered twice. On, off. On, off. Then on again.

Then they were out.

I was forced to dry my hands on my shirt (I had been washing them at the time), while dad went upstairs to get more things. He opened the door at the top of the steps and heard "a freight train's rumble, coming at you fast" at the top of the stairs. I didn't hear anything, but my dad knew exactly what that sound was, as he'd been through a tornado before before I was born. He tore down the stairs, blasting louder than I thought possible to get in the weight room. It's the safest room in the house, as it's boxed by dirt, for the most part. We huddled in the far corner, listening and praying. That's about all we could do.

Almost 30 seconds later (though it's impossible to tell, really,) we unstuck ourselves from the corner, ever silent to increase our hearing capacity. Dad said that he was going upstairs to see the damage. He had no doubt in his mind that it was a tornado that struck. He opened the basement door, surprisingly finding that floor to be mostly intact. he then proceeded to race outside to find out what happened. It's raining, of course, and lightning is all around, but he doesn't care. He looks back at the house and finds, much to the entire neighborhood's surprise, was that our house was untouched by the tornado that passed right through our house. Not a petal on the Bradford Pear tree that sits in our front yard had fallen to earth, in fact, the only evidence of a tornado on our property was an eight-foot-long 2x4 pole that had somehow landed between the tree and our front porch. How it didn't impale something, I can't say. Other bits of shingles from various houses were scattered though our front yard (and backyard) like pepper flakes from a giant shaker.

Well, my dad, not finding any superficial damage to our house, races down the street to the rest of the neighbors.

I cannot describe the awfulness of what ripped through our streets.

Trees, limbs, plywood, flip-flops, yard equipment, and 50-pound-bags of fertilizer were strewn across the street. Telephone poles were down, whole sections of roof were deposited into trenches, and trees were blocking every imaginable path.

It was all that, and worse.

In pitch black, my dad was able to climb over entire clumps of trees that minutes earlier had been unceremoniously uprooted and tossed around hither and thither, finding his was to various houses and up the hill of our street to the main road. I have no idea how he did it, he must have been fueled by amount of adrenaline that would kill a normal man. He did not find any fatalities, and with the storm brewing again with lightning enough to see the carnage, he sprinted down the 1/2-mile hill in perhaps half a minute. Soaked and winded, he burst into the basement and told my mom and me all that had happened.

We were in a predicament: we could not call out, since our house lives in a cell-phone dead zone, and, of course, our landline was out. But wait! Dad remembered an old phone we have that plugs into a jack, and sure enough we got a dial tone. We called my grandmother and instructed her on how to check the radar online, and she kept us posted through the next few hours.

The rest of the night consisted of trying to sleep, talking about what had happened, getting more supplies down from upstairs, and cranking an ancient radio that, of course, in the age of pre-recorded programming, insisted on blaring songs and hardcore-politics talk radio into our basement. Luckily it had a volume control.

Occasionally, there would be an emergency broadcast that told us what we already knew, and eventually we all got to sleep. All but my dad, that is. He was understandably wired from the night's events and spent the night checking the radio and trying to unclog our problematic basement toilet.

The next morning, he was out and about before 8:00 talking to neighbors and informing gawkers that came to the area. Again, no fatalities, a real miracle. One house's roof got torn straight off, most had superficial shingle damage, and one fared particularly bad with not only an open-air bedroom but also a collapsed garage. Someone told him later that both cars were picked straight up and deposited in the backyard of said house. They were even still drivable, as the owner had since gotten them away.

Later, after a quick bite of cereal with somewhat-warm milk (remember, still no power at this time), I geared up, boots and all. Another one of our neighbors came over and asked if we had any jumper cables. (Since I'm also taking care of her four cats from Good Friday-Easter Monday, I could only imagine her trying to shock a cat cartoon-style.) We said that we had some, and we brought them over. We then looked into the garage of the next house, one that Dad had looked into earlier that day, and saw where a 2x4 went through his roof, into his attic, through the insulation and cieling, down at a 45-degree angle into his laundry room. Another one had crashed his house earlier and presumably landed into his cemented garage.

The rest of the day was filled with helping out the neighbors clean out debris and sharing stories. Most were comparable to us, except for one lady who told us the story of another family that had huddled into their house's extension's closet, only to have it get blown apart and their three children scattered throughout the yard. The parents were able, thankfully, to gather their kids and head for shelter to their next-door neighbor's house, the house of the lady that was telling us all this. On top of all that, all of the children survived, except for cuts, bruises, and a broken leg for one, and 14 stitches for another.

One man, with slightly more hillbilly in his voice than the majority, was very vociferous about the spectators that were clogging the roads for the workers who were trying to help. "It just *censored* *censored for fear of giving away censored word* that people would just block dem roads," he said. I do not normally use expletives, but I must say that I agreed with his sentiment.

After realizing that we had left the gas logs on (oh dear) in the house, Dad and I decided to trek beyond our woods in the back of our property through to the extensive neighborhood behind us. We saw everything as normal (they even had power), until rounding a corner.

Simply put, I thought our street had it bad.

Almost every house on the stretch had some sort of tarp on their roof, windows and/or garage doors blown in, and a patch of concerned, worrisome people in front of it, along with a few cars. They were lucky not to have many trees, otherwise it would have been even more horrible.

Past this carnage, on the other side of the cordoned-off power-company-truck-strewn main road, there was absolute desolation. We got over to the other side, and somewhat hazardously walked through to our old neighborhood. We used to live in an old, yellow-vinyl-sided Ranch-style house, and we moved out about five years back. The house looked like it had been painted, but it was just debris. The pines in the back looked like they had been through a blender, and the front was decimated. But that was nothing compared to the rest of the cul-de-sac: to the left, ripped roofing and soaked plywood on top of an already-badly-build house was left, and farther along, the more of the same you got. But to the right? Oh, to the right was hard to look at.

It used to be a modular house. The bottom part was alright, but the back of the top portion had caved into a heap off to one side. What was left of the top was rotated and moved at a 45-degree angle, and was sitting quite precariously on on the lower half. It was leaking its supply of old mattresses, clothing (most of it pink), and insulation. In the front, a swarm of human ants were helping the former residents salvage what they could from the wreckage. It's hard to believe these things when you see them on TV, or in pictures, but seeing it real and knowing the residents personally was not only bad, but also more than a little bit creepy. If all three of them had been home, one of them wouldn't have made it.

Ending our rightward sweep, we see a condemned house, roughly spray-painted with an X on top of the date. From what we gathered from police officers, that particular house had been lifted off of its foundations and back down again.

The middle of the cul-de-sac itself was destroyed. The only remains of multiple Hollies and a tree was a clumped-up pile of leaves and pea-sized red berries, the rest of which I found in the backyard of the demolished modular.

We were cutting across to another neighborhood not to far from there, only to find the remains of the front of our old mailbox on the far side of a parking lot. Dad picked it up, and I convinced him that we should turn it into a memento of the tornado.

The next set of streets we viewed were okay, considering what we'd seen before. A little under 50% of the windows were out, porches and sheds were leaning, and roofs lost their shingles, but none of the wreckage we saw before. Cutting across the cordoned-off main road, we saw a house that had its entire top level sheared right off like a hot knife through butter. I mean, it was a clean cut. Still, no fatalities, more of a miracle with every disaster we viewed.

Finally, we got back to the house and told Mom all that we had seen. When I told her where I'd found our old mailbox, she was practically in shock.

Now we finally had a chance to relax after a day of walking around. I built a steampunk-pirate MOC to relieve stress of seeing the carnage from the day, while Mom still tried the hand-crank radio to find some work of weather report.

Still later, Dad left to check on the road again, and I decided that I'd eat the ice cream that was in the freezer. When we got it out, it was pretty mushy, or "soupy" as I called it, but I ate it and went out to find Dad. He was guiding a family that live in the neighborhood directly behind us through our woods. I came out and guided then through the now-marshy cut-through area. After I came back out, I grabbed the digital camera and went up the street with Dad. Dozens of cherry-pickers were guiding new cables to still-standing and newly-erected poles. It was a sight to see, made even more impressive by the local reporters around. We went down to both sides of the street, seeing more damage to both left and right, though right was significantly worse. Still, no fatalities.

A bit of levity was invoked by Dad when he recognized our 2x4-missile neighbors and told them that he had made them and their damaged house famous around the area.

We made it back to the house just before dark, and were able to prepare out house for night. A few minutes later, what do you know, the power's on! So much of throwing out the ice cream.

I am still surprised and shocked, but in a good way, that there were no fatalities. Considering what I'd seen firsthand, and the reports of various city workers, I am very, very happy that no one was killed, including myself, my family, and people we know. All of us are amazed, and everyone we've told was amazed, that our house was unscathed.

…

That was my past 24 hours. What's yours been like?