Chicken Fried Squirrel.: tornado

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am NOT a local, nor am I from anywhere around here. I'm an outsider from the other side of America, staying for a couple years in this lovely little spot of the country. My family is new to the South, new to storms and small towns. This is my outsider perspective from my first-hand experience.

Camden, Arkansas is one of those towns that sometimes struggles to keep going. The proportion of middle-class incomes to poverty is sadly skewed and too many people are barely holding on. It's a little town full of the sweetest, most honest and humble people in the country, but too many of them have worry lines from the corners of their eyes to the tips of their toes. Holding on, raising kids, looking for work, struggling for good health and trusting Jesus to make all the ends meet.

So Thursday night was a punch in the gut for our little town. I couldn't sleep at all, mostly because I had subscribed to FIVE, yes five separate storm alerts, and the iphone under my pillow kept buzz buzz buzz buzz buzzing to flash me FIVE individual tornado warnings and watches and thunderstorm upgrades. I've never heard nor do I have words to describe the air-sucking, mountain-shattering ungodly winds that pushed and bullied our helpless house and the miles of black forest outside. Around midnight the frenzy paused, then a pile of papers was catapulted from the headboard inside our air-tight room with all the windows closed. Paper flying across the room without a visible cause. I wrapped up in my husband's grandma's hand-stitched quilts while God commenced with His version of the Grand Finale at the Fourth of July fireworks show. Lightning crackled and sizzled across the whole horizon followed by thunder on the decibel level of a nuclear blast, inverted geisers of water drowning the ground, and above it all the tops of massive oaks and phone lines flipping through the neighborhood like terrible tumbleweeds. We don't have a shelter, and I'm trained in rattlesnake safety but unfamiliar with tornado warning protocol. In hindsight I should've stuffed the kids under mattresses in the hallway, but Jason assured me that everything was fine.

And so he thought until he went out for his Friday morning walk and found the world torn apart in our poor little town. Now the community who barely keeps up has been working to get back the power, and mend the windows and doors and roofs of our homes and schools. Camden was blessed to have very little injury considering the destruction. This was a tiny storm on the scale of storms, but a huge hole in the wall of a home you could barely afford is, well, HUGE to the family that had nothing extra to begin with. God bless our little town as they rebuild and help neighbors rebuild, all with smiles and faith and a humble can-do attitude.