ssmariannas

The day had started out calmly. The sun pushed me out of sleep, its rays gently warming my face. I staggered out the cabin door, my eyes still foggy with sleep, and stretched, yawning. The salty lake air brushed across my face, forcing me to break out into a smile. I only had a week left on this tiny island that I loved, and I planned to enjoy that week. I went about that day doing my normal activities, swimming (more like drowning) in the lake, killing my fingers by picking blueberries, and getting ambushed by my best friend Sophia in rat-a-tat-cat (a simple card game). All in all, it was a great day. Nobody suspected that anything could be wrong. Sure, we were supposed to get a ton of rain the next day, but that was OK - today had been fabulous enough. That night, right before I went to bed, I looked up at the sky, hoping to see a shooting star. All I did see was a black carpet pulled over the once beautiful blue sky. As a six year old, I wasn't too worried about it, but did ponder it for a while. Something didn't seem right. I couldn't put my finger on it, but right as I looked up at that dark, gray sky, I felt a tingle down my spine. Not liking the feeling, I walked back inside of the cabin that I was staying in to listen to my parents read to me. About halfway through the book, I heard the wind, banging on the windowpanes and door. My mother's voice slipped a notch, but she kept reading. Two seconds later, the door and windows flew open. I gazed, open-mouthed, as my parents ran to close the windows. My eyes widened, but not in fear. I had never seen my parents this worried about a mere thunderstorm. I was not afraid of thunderstorms; in fact, I acknowledged them to be a form of nature that occurred when God was angry. It only took me a few seconds to realize that this was not a thunderstorm. One word from my father's mouth explained it all, "Tornado." I had learned about tornadoes in school. They were large funnel-y storms that would make everything in its path look messed up. I was not incredibly shaken by the turn of events; in fact, I thought that my parents could just run outside and yell at the screaming wind to be quiet, and it would go away. My parents decided not to do this, but rather to run over to a nearby friend's cabin and hide there. Sophia and I huddled together as our parents spoke in voices of forced calm. In a few minutes, the tornado had disappeared. The damage, however, had not. A tree had fallen onto a cabin - //the cabin right in front of mine!// If the resident of that cabin had been there, they would have been killed! If my family had stayed in our cabin, we could have been badly hurt! I also found, about two days later, after I had explored around the "new" island covered with fallen trees, that a tree had fallen onto my car. Luckily, our car had been parked far away from the cabins, and all that had happened that seriously scared the car was that one door was slammed shut. Nothing, not anything, since that day, has even come close to making me so nervous.