It was June 2, 1998. We were celebrating my son’s third birthday. We had cake and ice cream to celebrate. It also took a while for my son to open presents. We gave him a while to play with his new toys before we put the kids to bed. When my wife and I finally got to bed, it seemed like it would take a while before we could settle down from the night’s activities to fall asleep. We had been in the bed about 10 minutes, the smoke detector made a sound. It lasted longer that the chirp they make when the battery is low. But it only stayed on for 2 seconds at the most. It was long enough that we got up and started sniffing around the house. We found nothing wrong. We got back in bed but about 30 minutes later, the smoke detector made the noise again. Again, the sound lasted less that 2 seconds but longer than a chirp. There had to be something wrong but when we got up to look, we still couldn’t find any problems. We returned to bed. We went through the same routine 30 minutes later when the alarm went off again. This time, we reluctantly removed the battery from the smoke detector before returning to bed.
30 minutes later, a loud clap of thunder would get our attention. The way it echoed in the distance made it sound more like a bomb than a typical thunderclap. In my exhausted state, I strongly considered the possibility that it was a bomb. About two minutes past before we heard hail hitting our roof. I got up and ran to our back door to see tennis ball sized chunks of ice bouncing on our deck. My wife got up and turned on the TV check on what they were saying about the weather. We lived in a small town called Livingston in middle Tennessee at the time and our news came from a station in Nashville. When the television came on, the first thing she heard the weather reporter say was “and there is a tornado over Livingston right now!”. My wife and I rushed upstairs to bring our son and daughter down to safety. Somehow my wife, who was 8 months pregnant at the time, ended up bringing my son downstairs. He was a chunky little 3-year-old. I should have been the one bringing him downstairs. The kids never woke up. Our house was on the side of a mountain and we found out later that the tornado had passed directly over our house. The house at the top of the mountain had been hit by the tornado along with a house in the valley below. The kids took our places in our bed. My wife slept in the bed with them, laying across the bed at their feet. I slept on the couch in the living room.
We were lucky that a roof and a trash can were the only things that had to be replaced. Nothing else was damaged. A month later, we had a new roof on the house and a new baby daughter inside.