Watching the Weather

There has always been something beautiful about nature.  I’ve known so since I was a child.  I would sit on my grandmother’s porch and watch the storms roll in, and be happy as a lark.  There was a form of serenity as you’d watch them off on the horizon.

I’ll always remember the first time I saw a tornado, was standing out in the front yard with my mom.  We looked to the east and saw the big shadow kind of pass behind all the rain so far off on the horizon.  The destruction was rather unparalleled afterwards, but it was an experience I know I’ll never forget.




And then I started hitting an age where I could follow the storms on the radar, and watch them out the window.  That was an interesting experience, as the radar technology got better and the Weather Channel came about.  Soon I was actually able to predict the storms as they rolled in.

The monkey wrench, as it were, came when I moved to North Carolina.  Before I had only lived in Texas, and the flat landscape was easy to predict weather on.  But I lived in the mountains of North Carolina, and yeah, predicting the weather became a guessing game.  The mountains was do all sorts of things to storms, so much that even the meteorologists on TV would have a pretty low amount of getting even the smallest things right.

But in the end, I couldn’t really watch storms in NC.  I was in a valley, and I never really wanted to be caught in a storm while watching it on a mountain.  At least there were no tornados, though we did have a bad hurricane come through....

Watching storms took a back burner there, and I got out of the habit of sitting around watching storms.  That is, until I moved in with my Aunt in Arkansas.  I was there when the tornado hit Vilonia, it was where I worked.  I stood outside and watched the tornado just BARELY miss the house.  I really got back into watching storms.

So now that I’m in Oklahoma, and there’s tornados all the time, I’ve gotten back into watching the weather full time.  I love how far weather forcasting and the radar has come.  The fact that I can pull up my iPad and see instant radar (though normally delayed by a few minutes) is astounding.

So all that combined, means I get to stand out under our awning and watch the storms roll in with more accuracy that ever before.  Especially now that I’ve learned so much about how to read clouds and formations on the radar.

Storms are such amazing things to witness, and I long to go out and get lightning photos.  Nothing like having such things on the to-do list.  One of these days I’ll definitely get around to it, because I’m not going to stop watching storms any time soon.  Nature is too beautiful to ignore.