Weather Forecasts

Count Your Blessings - Day Twelve

Have you ever heard of The Children's Blizzard? Here is the dust jacket synopsis from the book of the same name:

January 12, 1888 began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent.

By Friday morning, January 13, some five hundred people lay dead on the drifted prairie, many of the children who had perished on their way home from country schools. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harsh environment. Recent immigrants from Germany, Norway, Denmark, and the Ukraine learned that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled.

The Children's Blizzard, by David Laskin is a fascinating true story, heart wrenching, and heart warming. I highly recommend it.

We are so blessed to have high tech weather forecasting, and rapid dissemination of those forecasts through radio, television, internet, even phones. Yesterday a violent storm passed through our area. We were under a tornado watch in our town, and just north of us where our daughter was working a tornado warning. I'm grateful for the miracles of technology that keep us safe. Iowa is the only place I've ever lived where the weather has the ability to make me feel nervous.

Photo taken earlier this year (see the date!) Tornado season is April through November