Spring Has PMS

Everything is a little off kilter right now. It’s hard to explain, but I think I go through this every Spring.

I’m so off kilter, in fact, that I had written an entirely different blog today and tried to email it to myself from work, and it’s not in my email. I don’t know where it is or if I accidentally sent it to someone else. If you get a cryptic email about Netflix and flipping a coin, just send it to me at kat@angelwhoswears.com please!

The weather is not helping. Those of you who are living anywhere from the middle part of the country to the north probably understand what I’m talking about.

As my friend, Lori, over at Come Hell Or High Water Blog said recently: “It’s day 1,937 of winter.” She lives in Pennsylvania so I’m sure those of you up North and East can relate.

Here in Oklahoma, the weather is kind of crazy this time of year anyway, but we’re having a really weird one this year. Stranger than I remember in a long time.

In one day we had snow, then sixty degrees. Then we had a hard freeze at night and eighty degrees the next day. We’ve had wind, wildfires, rain, heat, cold, hail and earthquakes. The only thing that has conspicuously been missing from Oklahoma weather are tornadoes.

There have been no tornadoes reported this year in Oklahoma, and if it keeps going we’re actually going to set a record.

Usually, by this time, we’ve done this at least once:

Instead, we’re doing some of this:

Ok, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it’s not too far off. I mean, I’m ready to get the sandals on and put the boots away already!

I grew up in the desert, so this kind of weather was foreign to me until I was in my late twenties. El Paso has four seasons but they consist of hot, not as hot, sandstorm, and cold. Cold only lasts about a month. This is what Spring looks like back home (video courtesy of Trey Carr):

Ahhh…yes…who doesn’t love the taste of dirt in the morning?

When I was twelve, we moved from the only house I had ever lived in to a new house in a small community called Santa Teresa, New Mexico. Santa Teresa is literally less than a mile over the state line from Texas to New Mexico and the city of El Paso runs right up to the line, so it never felt like I lived in a different state, but our neighborhood was so isolated, it felt like we were in the outback.

Our house was in a brand new addition and there were no houses to one side of us or behind us. Our backyard was “fenced” in with a stucco wall, which is customary in the area. Beyond that, was nothing but desert for miles. It wasn’t unusual for us to see roadrunners running across the top of the stucco wall, or see a tarantula running across the driveway, or find a scorpion in the bathtub. I learned how to drive dodging tumbleweeds as big as my car.

That first Spring, with only a house on one side of us, and a few across the street, the sand blew relentlessly. Every day there was at least a half inch layer of sand all around the insides of the window sills and around the exterior doors. Everything near the windows and doors was constantly covered in a layer of dust. I had grown up dealing with dust storms and wind, but this was a whole new level, and I was sure that my parents had moved me to Hell.

Then I moved to Tornado Alley. Basically, I moved from the land of hurricane force straight line winds to wind that moves in a funnel.

Believe it or not, though, my first encounter with a tornado wasn’t when I moved to Oklahoma. It was when I was in college in South Central Texas.

My roommate and I had gone to high school together in El Paso, so we knew nothing of tornado watches or warnings. I don’t think we had even paid attention to any weather reports as we pulled into the Walmart parking lot to buy some stuff for our dorm room. It was sunny and humid when we went inside.

Coming back out, though, it was storming a little. We watched as it hailed a little before we made a break for the car. As we ran out, a man was running by yelling at us about something and pointing in the other direction, but neither of us could hear what he was saying. My roommate started the car, backed out of the parking space, and turned to exit and that’s when we saw it.

A. Huge. Fucking. Funnel.

And it was coming right toward us.

“What do we do????” my roommate screeched.

“Oh shit! I don’t know!” I answered, because I really didn’t. Obviously, though, my fight or flight took over and I at least remembered that the worst place to be in a tornado is a car.

“We need to go inside!”

Even though this happened more than twenty years ago, I still remember that sound. They say a tornado sounds like a freight train. They are right. Only it sounded a thousand times louder to me.

She parked the car and we made a run for the store. By then, the employees were herding all the customers toward the center of the building, away from the windows.

An old lady wearing a Walmart vest and looking like she had smoked three packs a day for the last forty years didn’t look too phased. She fiddled with the glasses attached to a chain around her neck and said in a slow, raspy drawl, “If that funnel hits, y’all need to get under them clothes racks in case them winders break.”

My roommate looked like the woman had just spoken to us in Chinese. Luckily, I was a language major and was fluent in redneck. I’m sure my ability to understand her had nothing whatsoever to do with my family tree.

“We need to get under the clothes racks in case the windows break,” I told my roommate. The old lady wandered away from us, and I was pretty sure she was going out for a smoke, tornado be damned.

About that time, a man who had been watching from the doors yelled, “Here it comes!” just as the lights went out.

And then silence.

Literally nothing.

After a few minutes, someone peeked out and gave the all clear. My roommate and I stumbled out to our car in a daze, staring at all of the debris in the parking lot, but realizing nothing was really damaged.

As it turns out, the funnel had lifted up about a quarter to a half mile away from us, went over us, and then touched back down somewhere down the road and hit a tornado magnet trailer park.

Of course.

We found out later that six funnels actually touched down in the Bryan/College Station area that day. It was like Mother Nature was saying, “Welcome to college, bitches!”

Since moving to Oklahoma, I’ve spent a lot of tense moments watching the weather, but only a handful of times that I was frightened enough to get in the closet, bathtub, or hidey-hole under the stairs. It seems like it always happens at night when you get woken up out of a dead sleep by sirens. You turn on the weather and when they start naming cross streets where you live, you can get dressed all the way down to shoes pretty damned quickly.

I have my own ritual where I stuff my pockets with all the jewelry they will hold, put on my Mom’s diamond watch and engagement ring, and I stuff cash, ID and credit cards in my bra in case my purse gets sucked away from me.

Seriously, whoever finds my body is going to win the effing lottery.

The Husband Dude, of course, is pure Oklahoman. He cracks open a drink and stands out on the front porch, watching and taking pictures.

But here we are now, wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. In the meantime, we’re wearing jackets in the morning and shorts in the afternoon.

I’m emailing blog posts out into la-la-land.

And winter is just being tenacious, like an old lady in a Walmart vest, smoking another Marlboro in the middle of a hailstorm.

Stay weird, my friends. Normal is boring.