Spring on the prairie, twister time in tornado alley. … Ask anyone in Oklahoma, approaching storms, can be felt, smelt, miles away. On certain afternoons, the air, quivering with energy, releases a faint stale chemical smell, and the earth itself is charged. Lustered wheat fields, highways and backyards, old cars and roses, suggest the existence of another life, more sheeny and coppery than our own. The sky’s intensely white brain, cumulo-nimbus, roils savagely up against the darkening gun-metal blue that some call heaven, a place where the dead live. In a grandmother’s hands an old leather bible falls open to the Revelations. … On the prairie, you sense the storm coming long before you see it.

Photo Credit: John Chambers