"Sir, this is ADT. We have a fire alarm at your home, we have alerted the local fire department. Are you there?"
"Nope."
"Can you get there quickly to confirm?"
"Nope. But, my wife's there. Have you tried to contact her?"
"We have, sir. There's no answer on the home phone."
The Colonel had last talked to the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda a couple of hours previously. She'd then told him that she had been invited to go play cards with a group of ladies from the church. In the background, the Colonel could hear thunder.
"Sounds like you have some bad weather there, Babe."
"Yep. Maybe we'll get some rain and fill up that mud puddle you call a 'lake'."
"Lake Brenda is not a mud puddle."
"Whatever."
"Just be careful driving tonight, okay?"
"I will. Call me later tonight?"
"Sure. Love you. Bye."
The call from ADT revived old feelings of helplessness, the likes of which the Colonel had felt many times before -- deployed thousands of miles from home and unable to do anything constructive to influence an emergency on the homefront. Believing that the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda must still be away from the house, the Colonel thumbed her cell number on his crackberry.
"Hey, babe," she answered cheerily.
"Go home. The house in on fire."
"No..., I don't think it is."
"Yes it is! Go home right now!"
"No it's not."
The Colonel clenched his fists and took a deep breath preparatory to placing his voice on the "stun" setting. In the momentary quiet before the storm, the Colonel heard the wail of a fire alarm.
"What's that noise? Sounds like a fire alarm."
"What? I can't hear you over the fire alarm."
"Where are you?"
"Standing outside in the front yard."
"Whose front yard?"
"Ours, knucklehead."
The Colonel took another deep breath, and slowly asked, again, "Is the house on fire?"
"Don't think so. I don't see any flames and it's too dark to see smoke."
"Did someone break in and set off the alarm?"
"No."
"Well... why is the alarm going off?"
"Could be because of the tornado that just hit the house."
"Tornado?"
"Yeah." The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda was very calm. That made the Colonel's blood run cold -- she was always calmest in the midst of calamity.
"Dear...?"
"Yes?"
"Is the house still there?"
"Yeah, but there's a lot of damage. And, it looks like Frank's barn is now scattered all over our property..."
"Are you okay?"
"Well, thanks for finally asking, knucklehead. I'm fine. When I heard it coming, I grabbed the cat and jumped in the bathtub."
The tornado had dropped down out of a thunderstorm just to the north of Oxford, ten miles south, and raced, ripping and rooting, almost due north towards the Colonel's vast holdings at the shallow northern end of deep southern nowhere. It was a Category Three when it blew straight up the road on which sat the house the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda had made their forever home just 9 months previous. A dozen homes along the mile and a half of that road exploded into splinters. That the Colonel's house was 300 yards off of the road, saved it from destruction.
Miraculously, no lives were lost.
The landscape was changed rather significantly, however.
The road on which the Colonel lives was once tree-lined. The tornado changed that. When emergency responders and local samaritans arrived, they found the entire length of the road blocked by an impenetrable abatis. Chainsaw crews worked through the night to clear the road for emergency vehicles. When the Colonel arrived a day later, he hardly recognized the area.
To this day, on his daily security patrols, the Colonel finds reminders of the tornado -- stumps of downed trees and detritus that once was the treasured belongings of neighbors to the south.
Today, he thanks a merciful God.
Please excuse the Colonel, while he goes to kiss his greatest treasure -- spared nature's wrath.
And, after he finishes loving on his tractor, the Colonel probably ought to go tell the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda that he is fond of her, too...
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