Five weeks after the tornado

I haven’t written about the tornado since we were a week-ish out.

It’s funny when I go back and read about the damage, or rather lack of damage, I thought we had. We knew we had some missing shingles and some damaged siding, and a busted up garage door and screen, but in the past month, we’ve discovered other damage.

We had a structural engineer come inspect our house a few weeks ago; he determined that we were very lucky in that we had lots of bracing in our attic space and that it probably saved our house from losing a wall in the tornado. But he did identify that we have a lot of stress cracks where the ceiling meets the top of the wall in a large number of areas in the second floor of our home, which was from the roof trusses flexing in the high winds and basically lifting off the house. We’ve also found that a lot of our windows have cracked caulk around them, as well as a good number of them having scratches from flying debris.

So it’s weird that we’ve been able to stay in our house but have so much work that will be done on our house. I feel guilty that we will have all this new stuff on our house when compared to other houses, ours doesn’t look bad. But then I remember (and am reminded, thank you Amy!) that we have insurance for a reason – and that it wouldn’t be fair that our home’s value decrease because I didn’t feel we were worthy of getting our home put back together. Should we really get all new windows when not all of them have damage? I feel the ones that aren’t damaged are fine and feel guilty asking to get the undamaged ones replaced. But then all the windows wouldn’t match and it’s not fair that our house lose value because of mis-matched windows. This is my constant internal struggle: “we don’t deserve it but we should have it fixed”. It must be the fiscal responsible-ness in me – if it were my own money I’d say we don’t do anything un-essential, since I hate spending money and stuff.

* * *

I keep having flashbacks to the evening of the tornado and feel so unbelievably lucky that no one was hurt. Especially me, since I really didn’t stay in the basement while an F-3 tornado destroyed a house 150 yards from us. Especially me, because I watched this horrific storm from behind the “safety” of my sliding glass door. Especially me, because I was running from window to window, watching siding and pieces of wood fly through the air. At the time, I thought I wanted to know what was happening to my house. But looking back, would that have stopped our roof from blowing off, if that was what was going to happen? I would have done a bunch of things differently with the hindsight I have now, including cuddling my kids under the stairs in the basement.

* * *

But I can’t change that. I can only say again that our house and our family were very lucky on March 15. I think the kids are doing ok – they don’t seem to be affected by storms or high winds, which is good. Mallory told me a few weeks ago that they had a tornado drill at school (pre-tornado) and that her class is supposed to go in the bathroom of their class¹. 

She had a writing assignment last week and this is what she came up with. The assignment wasn’t to write about the tornado, but that is what she chose.

The first picture is of the tornado. The middle picture is dark clouds, flashes of lightning, and two plates with hot dogs on them, with the caption: “we had to cot (count) the lightning.” The third picture is of our house, with the blue tarp covering the big hole in our siding, and the squiggle at the top is where our siding is all curled back from when they replaced the shingles, and then the stuff around the house is all the glass, and the caption is “glac (glass) in my nabrhd (neighborhood)”.

I find it interesting that she remembers eating hot dogs out on the deck while we watched the storm roll in.

* * *

I am ready for our house to be back to normal. I’m ready for all our neighbors to move back in. I’m ready to be done with dumpsters & trucks, and contractors who blow through stop signs in the nabrhd.

¹Add this to one of those “what is my kid learning at school that I don’t know about!” Apparently they do fire drills too. I mean, this is good, it’s just so weird that I didn’t know about it :-)