With January more than half over, I begin to take pleasure in the hope that winter, too, is half over. After all, there is left to us only February, March and April, and sometimes April proves rather beautiful.

Soon I can stop worrying about ice, snow and blizzards and concentrate on worrying about lightning storms, tornadoes and mosquitoes. I like to start my worrying early and get it over with.

In the 17-1/2 years I lived in Nebraska I encountered only two windstorms violent enough to be classed as tornadoes. Only one of them, the less serious of the two, was in my hometown.

We had windstorms all around us. My grandmother remembered as a girl being caught in a cyclone in western Nebraska on a farm without a storm cellar. She was attending a party and the company took refuge in the basement &045; a good move because the house blew away. In order not to follow the house, those of the party formed a circle and held hands.

Sometime while they were in the basement, a cow blew in and was set down by the wind in the exact center of the circle, stayed long enough to emit one long, loud moo and then was lifted out by the wind, not to be seen again.

Many of my grandmother’s stories made me wish I’d been there. This was not one of them. I felt sorry for the cow, too.

During another Nebraska storm my maternal grandfather had been taking his Sunday afternoon nap and had just arisen, when the large metal flag pole across the street was struck by lighting and came crashing down through the window above his bed, crushing it to the floor. Had he been in it there is little chance that he would have survived.

The elders in my hometown used to tell each other with some complacence that the reason tornadoes didn’t hit us was because we lived on the river’s edge. Even I didn’t buy that. What was probably the worst cyclone Nebraska ever had took place before my time, around Easter in 1913, in the Omaha area.

My father told me that after it was over a big music store in Omaha displayed a grand piano in its window with pieces of straw stuck in it like the needles of a porcupine, driven into it by the force of the wind.

The same river that ran through my town, the Missouri, ran through Omaha.

Many Nebraska farms, and even yards in town, had cyclone cellars, cave-like affairs in which dairy products and other perishables could be kept in the hot summer months.

My mother told me that one of their neighbors had been told by a fortune teller that her only son would die in a wind storm. The woman was so frightened by the prophecy that at the slightest threat of wind she would rush the kid to the cyclone cellar and see that he stayed there until the danger was over.

Then came a day when the woman was attending a Ladies Aid meeting at her church and was unable to get to her son when the storm broke. Frantic, she rushed home as soon as possible, expecting the worst. Her son suffered no ill effects, but the wind took down a huge tree which fell across the cyclone cellar, crashing entirely through it, demolishing its contents and closing off all breathing space. Her son survived because she wasn’t there to protect him.

I spent a long weekend on a friend’s houseboat and he used to entertain other friends by giving a horrible imitation of my reaction to storm warnings on our first night out.

I love boats and could hardly wait for my first trip on the river and all the boats were tied up at the landings because of the radio warnings. All the boats except ours.

The only thing I said was, &uot;I grew up in the tornado belt and believe me, there isn’t the slightest sign of a tornado.&uot;

We had a wonderful boat ride and just for the record there was no tornado.

Love Cruikshank is an Albert Lea resident. Her column appears Thursdays.