Frank met her at the door. “What on earth are you doing with Elisabeth?”

“I don”t know – forgot to put her down, I guess,” she offered.

“Looks like it’s going to be a bad one. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one come on so strong or so fast. And that lightning? Did you see that flash?”

She nodded, went in behind him and left the door open for now.

The gust of wind hit, and hit hard. Everything outside creaked and moaned. The rain never came, and the debris wasn’t like anything they had ever seen before. They had heard of it raining frogs and fish, and they were used to seeing roofing tin fly by.

One of the things that brought their loose-knit community together, they joked, was the sharing of roofing tin, and sometimes you could tell by the color just whose buildings the new ones had come from. Frank’s cow shed was covered mostly with Mr. Spivey’s red roof, the hen house with widow Jones’s green. Theirs, unpainted, was hard to find.

They weren’t prepared for what they saw, and they rubbed their eyes as if there was something wrong with the reception.

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