My phone woke me up first. I keep it plugged in beside my bed instead of an alarm clock. When the alarm goes off, the screen lights up brightly enough to wake me, and if it doesn’t, some cheesy guitar music starts to play very softly at first, then more loudly the longer it takes for me to shut it off. And when the screen came on and woke me up just before midnight last night, I thought at first it must’ve been the alarm and I was a little pissed because I felt as though I hadn’t slept much at all. Which I hadn’t, but I didn’t realize that until I picked up the phone and read the message on the screen: Severe Weather Warning.

Oh. Okay, thanks. Not the alarm, then. I shut it off and went back to sleep. Or as close to sleep as I could get with the thunder and lightning going on outside. Sort of drowsing on and off, really, and then not for very long. The tornado sirens started howling a little past midnight, first one very far off, then joined by another much closer, and then the one just a couple blocks away, which sounded like it was right outside our bedroom window.

My Darling B was asleep through all of this. She can sleep through just about any noise, but if I touch her shoulder, she’ll wake up instantly. I touched her on the shoulder. “What?”

“Are you awake? Really awake?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tornado siren.”

She listened a moment, heard it, gathered up her phone and Boo the cat, and set off for the basement steps at a trot. Woman doesn’t mess with tornadoes.

I grabbed a pair of pants, a jacket and a flashlight, stowed that in the basement, then went back upstairs to fetch Bonk. Once we were all safely settled in, B and I both started combing the internet for news. At least one tornado touched down in Verona and, we found out later, another one touched down in the Shorewood neighborhood of Madison. Here in Monona, though, we totally lucked out. It sounded like the zombie apocalypse out there, what with the sirens going, the rain pouring down and the thunder banging away, but it was all over in an hour and we never even lost power. We we came back up the stairs after one o’clock to head back to bed, a slow, steady rain was falling softly against the ground as if it were nothing more than an everyday summer shower.