The First Day of Summer 2011

As a lifelong Midwest resident, nothing gets my attention faster in the spring and summer months than the sound of the neighborhood tornado siren.

Growing up in Niles, Illinois, I can still remember tornado drills at Oak Elementary School: Moving from the classroom single file in a calm and orderly fashion into the hallway, where we immediately knelt down in front of our lockers, ducked and covered our heads with our hands, and were expected to wait quietly and patiently until the ‘all clear’ bell rang.

There were a total of two tornados that came near our house in my younger years – one that struck during a school day and one that happened over a weekend, and thankfully neither ever touched down. At home, my sister and I each grabbed our favorite stuffed animals and rushed into the basement, while my mom and dad raced around the first and second floors opening windows to help equalize the house’s pressure and save it from destruction (who the hell ever thought of that wise idea?).

As an adult, I heard the Niles’ tornado sirens shrieking on a hot July afternoon while I was working at Baxter Healthcare’s V. Mueller division, which manufactured ring-handled instruments found on surgical trays. As the building’s designated safety coordinator, it was my job to rush everyone from the front office and manufacturing floor into the employee locker rooms, the safest places in a building filled with millions of shards of stainless steel waiting to impale all of us.

Jim and I have spent the bulk of our dating and married lives residing in Aurora, Lisle, Naperville and Plainfield, all western suburbs of Chicago rather accustomed to ferocious thunderstorms and occasional tornados, including the deadly August 1990 Plainfield tornado that killed 29 people.

Tornado sirens sounding once a week during the spring and summer months quickly turned from terrifying to me to the weather norm for our new neighborhoods. As a matter of fact, what prompted us to move to Plainfield was the fact that our Naperville house did not have a basement, and an overactive spring tornado season convinced us our family’s long-term safety was at stake if we were going to remain in the western suburbs: We needed a basement for our future safety and current peace of mind.

As we watched the weather forecast after dinner and took a quick peek at The Weather Channel’s radar maps, both sources made it look like Plainfield was in a relative safe zone, with two separate storm systems skirting by us to the north and to the south.

But the practical views out our back kitchen window and out on our deck told a different story: The air was still and ungodly hot and humid, and the sky was a sickish green-gray. Within a fifteen- minute span, our county went from safe to thunderstorm watch to thunderstorm warning to tornado warning.

As everything was happening so quickly, Jordan and Jamie had little time to react, and were rather calm until they heard the tornado sirens, both close by and in the distance. Jordan immediately grabbed our cats, Jamie grabbed Buck, Jim grabbed a flashlight and cell phone and we headed for the basement, my laptop tucked firmly under my arm.

Within minutes, Storm Central was setup in our unfinished basement: While I listened to National Weather Service broadcasts on our emergency radio, Jim and Jordan scrambled around with cables and cords, assembled a folding table and hooked up my laptop as well as a small television to the spare cable connection. As Jim and I took turns running up to the first floor to look out the windows, Jamie flipped between The Weather Channel and local television stations while studying an Illinois county map on my laptop.

The temperature must have dropped at least twenty degrees, the weaker winds were strong enough to bend our twenty-plus foot backyard trees like rubbery dog toys, and the stronger gusts were powerful enough to knock me off balance. Lacy fingers of lightning competed with bolts that lit up the blackened sky, briefly revealing menacing clusters of towering clouds.

Once the warnings passed, everyone’s first stop was the kitchen, as apparently waiting out a tornado builds hearty appetites. Jordan and Jamie ranked this evening as the scariest Plainfield storm they remember because the lights kept dimming in the basement and the loud sirens blaring in the wind made it creepier because the alarms made it feel like a tornado was just around the corner.

Happy First Day of Summer, everyone …