Tornado

As many of you may have heard, tornado season came early this year here in Oklahoma. These pictures are of the destruction in Lone Grove, which is about five miles west of our home in Ardmore. This tornado killed eight people in a trailer park and one truck driver as it crossed the freeway just north of Ardmore. On Saturday our stake organized the "Mormon Helping Hands" group to help with the cleanup. Michael spent most of the morning picking up debris from some fields so that it will be safe to put the cattle back in them. Michael's parents were visiting for the week and got to experience a little more of Oklahoma than they wanted. That night we had just come home from dinner to celebrate Michael's 28th birthday. As soon as we got out of the car we heard our neighbor yelling across the street to another neighbor about a tornado, and then our siren went off and we went in the house to turn on the news. It was exciting at first to hear from the storm chaser on the news that it had touched down twenty miles south of us, and that it was going north at forty miles an hour, then to hear that it was going strait for Lone Grove made us realize that if it started to turn east it would be coming at us. My mother-in-law was not the least bit excited about any of this, especially realizing that we did not have a storm shelter yet! Relief mildly explains how we felt to hear that it was going straight north through Lone Grove, and crossing the freeway just north of our little town. All of our ward members were very lucky, some of their homes being missed by just yards, and the most damage done to any of their homes was just missing a few shingles.