Storm Front

Maybe now would be a good time to reflect:
A long time ago, when I lived in Colorado, I was helping out at my mother's house. She was away, so I had the place to myself. I was hanging blinds in her sewing room. This was the room which had been mine before the great shift, the one that moved me downstairs and bumped my younger brother into this, the eventual sewing room. Standing on a stool, working with a little screwdriver and even smaller screws, I was attempting to get a little plastic box to stay in the corner of the window so that I could eventually hang blinds across where curtains used to hang.
I was looking at my task, and for a moment I looked away to refocus my tired eyes. Looking out to the east, I saw something I had never seen before. I saw purple clouds. Not the dusky gray kind that accompany a sunset. These were the color of a bruise. A very deep bruise that would take some time to heal. I had seen bruises like that, but not clouds.
In Colorado, we are used to afternoon thunderstorms. This was not what I was witnessing. Maybe it was hail? But as I stood there, screwdriver in my hand, one side of the blind hanging barely moored to the window frame, the purple deepened again. A finger began to point down from the cloud, pulling a cone behind it.
I was watching a tornado form.
Which was impossible.
I had grown up here at the foot of the Rocky Mountains with the certainty that no tornado could form this close to the Continental Divide. Sure, we had our share of wind, the kind that Native Americans called Chinooks, "snow eaters." There was no snow to eat. And those winds were almost always of the west to east variety. This protuberance from the sky was coming from the east.
And moving toward me.
What could I do? I thought of Dorothy Gale heading for the storm cellar in Kansas. I could go to the basement. But I stood there. Transfixed.
Until a sound broke my trance. It was a civil defense siren. A sound I had only heard in conjunction with tests, but now it was doing its job, telling me to stop what I was doing (staring dumbly out the window at a tornado forming) and head for cover.
About an hour later, my mom returned from wherever she had been. She was surprised to find me in the basement. None of the basement windows needed blinds. I asked her if she had heard the sirens. She told me she had not, but pleasantly stopped just short of mocking my terror. When I walked up the stairs, I could see that it had rained, but damp pavement wasn't the wreckage for which I had been preparing.
The storm had passed. It was time to get back to my chore. Keeping an eye out to the east nonetheless.