The air in Manchaca, Texas is muggy and grumbling this evening.  Low, dark clouds are shouldering against each other, and the buzzards who sleep on the Dark Tower at the end of the street are coming home to roost early.  The thunder is ominous but tentative, like a foul-tempered old man trying to make up his mind about whether a kid needs to be smacked.

It is on the verge of being Tornado Weather.

Growing up in rural Kansas, I learned how Tornado Weather felt, looked, and smelled.  And there’s a certain tipping point, a certain greenish tint and a certain thick, tense heaviness that the air takes on, when you know that something Big and Bad is going to happen.

The last time I experienced that feeling — when I had the sick, sure sense of inevitable meteorological doom – was on May 27, 1997.  I stepped outside that day, and the air was like atomized lead.

“It’s Tornado Weather,” I thought, and I spent the rest of the day watching the storm clouds, fully expecting them to try to murder my entire community.

But no tornado hit Manchaca that day.  Instead, an F5 monster mauled the town of Jarrell about forty-five miles north of here, killing twenty-seven people and scrubbing an entire subdivision down to the slabs.   (”F5″ was the most powerful storm rating on the old Fujita scale.)

I thought of the Jarrell tornado again three weeks ago, on May 4, 2007, when an EF5 wedge tornado destroyed Greensburg, Kansas, killing ten.  (The Greensburg beast was the first on record to hit the top of the new Enhanced Fujita scale, which had only been in place since February.  Lucky Greensburg!)

Both the Jarrell and Greensburg tornadoes reminded me (as did the 1990 Hesston tornado, the 1991 Andover tornado, the 1999 Moore tornado, and other Big Ones) of my most vivid memory from my pre-teen years:  The June 8, 1966 F5 tornado that devastated Topeka, Kansas.

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