The other morning Doug looked at the sky and said, tornado weather. The clouds were dramatic, moving fast, with pouchy bottoms and casting a greenish light that didn’t come through in this photo. It just looked spooky to me, but Doug has lived in Michigan long enough to know what it meant. I made sure I knew where the cat was, in case we needed to grab her for a trip to the basement.

It started to rain so hard and so noisily I thought it was hail. It was rain, crazy frantic rain, the kind they call “mata pajaritos” in Chile, rain that kills little birds, because it knocks the nests out of the trees. Rain made the water in the birdbath outside my window look like a mosaic, or the snakework in a medieval Celtic manuscript.

It was the middle of the afternoon, but the sky grew so dark the sensor on the back deck turned the string lights on. Rain streaked down the photo I took, like confetti. The power went out; the generator turned on. The alarm on my phone began to blare, the tornado sirens started to wail, and the cat freaked out. We grabbed her for the trek to the basement, freaking her out even more. It was nice down there, but she doesn’t like to be grabbed. As we settled her down we heard a big thump. In a few more minutes things got quiet and we went upstairs to check for damage.

The house was fine. The roof was fine. The yard was covered with leaf litter, the deck with overturned flowerpots, and in the backyard the top third of a black cherry tree was standing on its head, draped over a powerline. Thousands of people, said the radio, were without power; businesses were shuttered; there was a tornado, a small one they said, in Detroit. And yet the sky was all blue innocence.

We got the generator because, being at the end of a powerline that served only a few dozen people, we were usually – and quite reasonably – among the last to get restored. This time the tree hanging on the line was a hazard that bumped us ahead in the queue. With the widespread damage it still took a couple of days for DTE to get a crew out, but they did come, and chunked the tree into pieces and onto the ground. After they left I inspected the pile for birds’ nests, but it seems that none were harmed.