Tornado

It's that time of year; in fact, it's well into that time of year.
Tornado season.
I have seen others' reactions to the absolute destruction a tornado can wreak: their faces display utter shock and horror, and when they see the results, their eyes fill with tears.
To those of us who live here (in Tornado Alley), it's completely different. We're pretty much matter-of-fact about it. We are completely aware that every summer - some more likely than others - we could lose absolutely everything we have. We might... or we might not. The roof might fly off, and half of the big pecan tree might be just gone, leaving the car and all the furniture in the house untouched. Tornadoes are incredibly odd like that.
As soon as the sky darkens enough, the radar comes up in the corner of the screen, and that peculiar noise the Doppler makes as it sweeps the screen, we rush outside to see the storm coming. We live here, right in the center of Oklahoma, thirty minutes from the best weather research center in the country, and we go outside to watch. Then we rush back inside to look at the radar, and back out to look at small things borne along in the wind, and rain that goes at a nearly horizontal angle. It's pretty wild, really spectacular, but it's better not to stop to think about what you're actually seeing. And that's how we live here.
Our family actually lives in an upstairs apartment, not a cellar in sight. We just get the candles out (the wind breaks the power lines) and batteries for the radio, and wait it out. Sometimes it's every night for weeks, and sometimes it's only one or twice the whole summer.
I'm not the least afraid of tornadoes, but G-d forbid I had to move to a place where there were earthquakes.