It looked like one of those end-of-the-world movies. I wanted to make my 7-year-old laugh to lighten the mood so I started up with my cartoon voice, “Will we make it back home on time?! Oh no! The tornado is coming!”
She laughed.
By the time we were at Vaughan and Oakwood, big drops of rain started falling and the wind had picked up. We have big trees by our house, and I knew we would have to walk under falling branches to get to our front door. I kept up the game about getting home fast. “Will we make it?” “AAhhhh!” My daughter was having fun.
We made it home just in time.
It started pouring. My eldest was home so the three of us watched one of the most violent storms I had ever seen in Toronto. The wind pushed down our line of blue arrow pine trees close to the ground, and it started picking up our metal patio chairs.
Our lights flickered, but we didn’t lose power.
We got loud, blaring weather emergency alarms on our phones. “Take cover!” The alerts seemed to be shouting. My little girl wasn’t finding it too funny anymore and said we should go to the cellar, like Dorothy and Toto should have done in the Wizard of Oz.
But I was fascinated and couldn’t stop watching.
I had never seen anything like this growing up in Toronto.
I’ve never seen tornado warnings, hailstorms, red suns, smoke-filled skies, or flooding either.
Scientists this week confirmed that there is no turning back. We’ve gone beyond the tipping point for long-term climate change damage. But they say we can, and should, still put on the brakes.
Now that the weather is calm again, I doubt that we will. Our governments just seem to post on social media about it. They’re leaving it up to us to react to their own red, orange and yellow weather alerts.
