PDS - three letters that cause the heart to skip, the brain to seize, and the mothers of Oklahoma to go on high alert. PDS stands for Particularly Dangerous Situation, and yesterday was labeled a PDS here in the heartland. Even those of us who call these plains home, and who regularly experience weather scenarios of the white-knuckle variety, come to attention when those three letters are tacked onto the storm forecast. And then we spring into action. Those fortunate to have them clean the cobwebs out of their shelters, stocking them with bottled water, flashlights, and weather radios, along with anything they can’t possibly imagine living without once the clouds part. Which for me, with a clarity that comes within nanoseconds of remembering either May 3, 1999 or May 20, 2013, boils down to my husband, daughters, sons-in-law, and grandbabies. Everything else is chaff.
But yesterday’s PDS wound up
standing more for this- Pee Diddly Squat. Sure the clouds rolled, the lightning
flashed, the thunder roared, and the winds blew. But around here, we call
that...Tuesday. In other words, the situation failed to be particularly
dangerous. Even though words like hook echo, vorticities, dry line, and
mesocyclone poured forth from the mouths of our favorite weathermen, it was, by
Oklahoma standards, a non-event. Much ado about not much.
But something significant did
happen at our location last night- something weather related in the sense that
the alarming predictions of what might come brought family to the shelter of home
where, juiced by the excitement of storm preparation, we ate pizza, drank wine,
worked puzzles, read books, played hide and go seek, and talked, laughed and
“sillied” away the night, as the voices of the hyper-vigilant weathermen droned
on and on in the background. It should
have been frightening. It could have been dangerous- even particularly dangerous. And for the fact that it wasn’t, we are
grateful. But for our family, last night’s storm vigil mutated into a different
form of PDS. One, in fact, that happens around our place any time our family is
together, no matter the season, but made more poignant yesterday, perhaps, by
the sense of an unmaterialized brush with mortality.
So my calendar is circled on
Tuesday, April 26th. It was cloudy, muggy, and it had all the
makings of something eventful; and when the family came together, with kids, dogs
and bags in tow, it became a PDS event after all. Pretty Damn Special.
