I remember back in 6th grade on a Sunday when I experienced one of the most terrifying events of my entire life. There was a report on the weather channel of severe weather that was supposedly going to hit Kokomo, Indiana, which was the city that I lived in at the time. There was a tornado warning out for our city and a few other small towns in the area.  I watched with keen interest as the weather channel showed the “hook” on the newscast as it was being formed. In those days, I was extremely into tornados; however, I was still afraid and concerned about one destroying our house. I don’t really know why I liked tornados so much, something about their destructive nature just fascinated me. We kept watching the television as we were concerned about whether or not our house would be hit by the storm. After a few minutes, the tornado siren began to go off and we listened with intense caution as we were nervously listening to it warn the city.

At the time that this event occurred to me and my family, my mother was married to a man who would later start acting out after me and my mom left him a year after this event. He, for some odd reason, decided to go out to our front yard and watch the storm pass. Then he looked across the field and saw what many people call a “transformer”, or a “power flash”. He also saw debris flying in the air in the distance. Unfortunately, he couldn’t see the tornado so he couldn’t see how fast it was going so he could have more time to get himself and us to safety. He then ran inside and opened the door and quickly told us to get in the downstairs closet. Of course, we got in there because it was a small, confined space so it was safe for us to go into. I remember me and my mom huddling close together in the small room with all the shoes everywhere and the coats hanging up.

I cried during this tense and terrifying moment and was hugging my mom while she was also crying and talking on the phone with my grandmother. We stayed in there for about 10 minutes sitting on the floor while our two-story blue house apparently shook a little as my mother described it. It felt like a very small earthquake that was just intense enough to shake a house. We also heard something hit our house a few times with a loud BANG! My former stepfather never joined us in the closet as he believed that he would be okay in the living room. My mother kept yelling at him to get in there with us. I began to wonder in fear and terror as I sat in the closet and thought that I was going to die and if that would be my last moments alive on this Earth.

After the storm, we left the closet to survey the damage done to our house. At the front entrance, water broke through the locked door and onto the floor. In the backyard, there were sticks and a medium-sized black garbage bag on the ground. During the storm when we heard something hit the house a couple times, it was most likely some heavy debris that the tornado picked up. The large banging sound echoed off the walls and to our ears. There was a small hole near the top of the house on the right side, in the dark attic that we never used when we lived there. My mother was absolutely in a state of shock as she saw the damage that was done to our house. I was thinking, how could this horrible event happen to us? After we cleaned up the house we left in out car and went to look at the damage in the neighborhood and the rest of the city.

It was a mess around most of the city after the storm passed from the area. We saw more houses in our neighborhood that were damaged by the tornado and around the area. One house in our neighborhood had some small damage to the side of it like ours. We saw a house that was completely destroyed and lying in the middle of the road blocking cars from traveling on it. The tornado made me realize how fragile life is and about how precious our lives and possessions are. Luckily, no one in the city was killed or even injured due to being prepared from the weather channel warning us of the storm. It made me think about how important it was that we were informed of the approaching danger rather than be taken by surprise at its arrival.