atlanta tornado

i live in downtown Atlanta in a 100+year old former rug factory my husband (with a bit of help from me) developed into our home and work space, a process that took a tremendous amount of blood, sweat, tears, ingenuity, and stamina - and we're still not done yet...

i was shutting my computer down Friday night when I heard some lightning in the area and the power went out. Our dogs are terrified of storms and all three needed to be in the bed or right next to it. Gorgeous but stinky brindle dog Spooky was shivering through the night and kept licking me with her fuzzy-yucky tongue. Once in the night I heard some short bursts of hail.

Woke up in the morning - still no power. My husband hooked up the generator to the fridge and then television and learned a tornado had struck downtown just as we lost power in the evening. The Georgia Dome and CNN, less than a mile from our house, had sustained a large amount of damage, as well as Centennial Park, many downtown buildings and hotels, and residences in nearby Cabbagetown and East Atlanta were affected. We climbed up on our roof and saw the eerie sight of broken windows in many of the downtown skyscrapers, emergency lights flashing, and drapes billowing from broken Westin windows on the highest floors. Later in the afternoon, another tornado watch and some serious hail, and we gathered up the dogs and went down to our basement grotto with candles and waited out a brief storm. It was a long, quiet day. Our power was restored at 10:30 pm.

My mom gave me some prayer flags for my birthday this past summer, a string of colored flags that say peace in several languages. We hung them on the front of our building. They were always getting tangled in the wind and twisted up, when I wish they would hang nicely. But Tibetan lore says when prayer flags flap in the wind, prayers are released out into the world. We were beyond lucky to be just outside the path of the storm, that the elements somehow spared our home and work. I thought maybe the prayer flags had a small part in our good fortune. Now our prayer flags are flying for the rebuilding and revitalization of downtown Atlanta.