Chapter One:  Nature’s Atom Bomb

  Before the greenish radar scans, before blurry photographs from satellites, before television or television meteorologists, and before the snappy twenty-four-hour-a-day Weather Channel, there was this: the faint flicker of lightning and the distant growl of thunder on the prairie’s horizon. This was what amounted to a storm warning on the plains. 
   The far, open sky filled with mountainous cauliflower clouds that grew fat with rain and hail, and those dark olive-hued clouds could conceal the most powerful force known in nature—or not. No one knew for sure, no mere mortal could; after all, the tornado, or cyclone as it was called on the plains, was an act of God, an Old Testament punishment for ill deeds or a test of faith. It was capricious and deadly, leaving the living to bear witness that the great wind came straight from heaven, or so it seemed. 
   April 9, 1947, sometimes seems like yesterday for Ramona Kolander. Not that she dwells on the day, but it’s impossible to forget a day that turns your life upside down. Not even a day really, just a few seconds, and a life’s course is altered forever. (CLICK HERE FOR PDF)