Photos were coming in all day yesterday of tornado damage across Indiana. There are a lot of places in the state that were hard hit, several of them in the Indianapolis area.
This is the Carmel tornado. Carmel is a northern suburb of Indianapolis and is the location of the place where Craig and I volunteer several times a month.
The Indianapolis temple of our church is just an hour's drive from us. We have been volunteering there since it opened in 2015.
The Carmel tornado just missed the temple (red dot) and the home on the grounds where our besties, Pat and Lisa, live. (They are the directors of the temple.)
Alerted to the fact that strong storms were on the way, they closed the temple and sent everyone home. The temple was cleared of people just thirty minutes before the tornado blasted through Carmel. And its path was very, very close - it passed just a block or two south of them.
I am so grateful that Pat and Lisa were not hurt and that the buildings did not sustain any damage from the tornado.
Lisa and me in Chicago, 2010.
Lisa and I have been close friends for twenty years, and Craig and Pat since they met as students at Purdue.
She is from Arizona and grew up on a ranch so she is familiar with horses.
Feeding Abby peppermints in 2017.
When Abby unexpectedly died, she and Pat dropped everything and drove up from Indianapolis, freshly baked cinnamon rolls in hand, and came to see how I was doing and offer condolences. Aside from my family, they were the only people I was willing to see and talk to at that awful time.
A month later, Lisa gave me a lovely gift for my birthday, the Abby necklace, that she'd had specially made for me.
Such dear friends, and I am so grateful that they were not hurt in the Carmel tornado.
(I just realized that I've done the same thing I did when I wrote about my western saddle. The topic shifted to Abby at the end of that blog post and I've done it again - I'm writing about my girl even though this was supposed to be a post about our friends and the Carmel tornado. You never know what will bring your grief to the surface.)
