Because I am an older American and lived in Indiana, I was alive when tornadoes ripped through on Palm Sunday, 1965. I would have been a junior in high school and possibly fretting about homework that would be due on Monday. It might have been Easter Vacation, though, I really don’t remember.

What I do remember is my Mother coming into the West Room (aka – the Cold Room) and telling us a black cloud was coming very fast over the treeline. She and my grandmother went to the basement; I don’t know why my father and I didn’t feel the urgency to do so. And it seemed, at first, as if we had been right.

Then, a little while later someone came to the door and asked if we had phone service and added that the farm house across the field and beyond the trees had been lifted up and turned on its foundation. Down the road, houses were picked up and thrown into the lake.

Just a little northwest of the house, on the road we took to the orchard, a man I knew sat on his lawn with his house in shambles, a huge, huge tree totally uprooted not far from him and metal from silo wrapped around trees in a nearby woods.

Forty-seven tornadoes killed 271 people. One lifted after it hit that aforementioned farm house and went right over our heads and set back down – and we didn’t even know it. Amazing. And tragic for others.