I was on the phone about something that felt important when my coworker came in and made gestures towards the window I didn’t understand.

When I hung up the phone, I walked into her office. She pointed it out: a waterspout on the river. Oh!

I’m endlessly curious about this stuff and she knows it. Another coworker, who started the role somewhat recently, told me about wanting to see a waterspout. I find him, call him over, and we all watch the air spin.

It hits land. We depart each other’s company discussing how that was interesting. A little novelty to break up the day. See, waterspouts usually end at landfall. We see them sometimes, but usually off more towards the center of the lake, not at the river.

I sit down in my office and grab my phone to text my husband about what I saw. I notice that the dark cloud has kept moving, from behind City Hall. “The waterspout kept going?” I thought to myself.

I go my colleague’s office with a city view and you can see the swirling air, the debris, and what looks like a little tornado, blocks away from us. But I am of the mindset that I am watching wind that is pretending to be a tornado. My gut doesn’t call me to caution so much as my heart is calling me to curiosity. I am calm.

As a girl growing up in Syracuse, a small city, the big national news always happened Somewhere Else. We didn’t get tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, or National Football league teams. Now I live in a place that’s larger, but part of me has that “somewhere else” mentality, the “it’s not going to happen to me” mentality, because I think of tornados as being Kansas’ problem, not Buffalo’s. (A map tracking tornadoes from 1950-April 30, 2024 shows not an absolute absence, but an infrequency that creates that experience on the human life-lived scale.)

We continue to stand at the windows watching, which is the opposite of what you are supposed to do.

We see debris swirling with it and I think it’s trash. It’s a roof. This is the third tornado that Western New York has had in as many weeks. None of them were huge, but all called some damage. Thankfully no one is hurt, not physically at least. Our ideas of what is possible got wider in directions we never wanted to see.

Turns out it was a tornado that started in Ontario and meandered across the river. The rain had been so heavy that the visibility to Canada, for us, was poor. When we saw it over the water, we assumed that it started there. Turns out there are a couple ways tornadoes get formed: supercell thunderstorms (which are easier to detect) and landspouts. This was a landspout, where the spinning originates at the ground. It is hard to detect and no one was warned. Heck, I biked to work that day.

As a girl, I read about some events (pandemics, insurrections, world wars) and treated them as things that I read about, not things I’d live to see. I anticipated a quite, boring life. As youthful naivete fades, I learned that anything is possible. Particularly the misfortunes.

That’s not a reason to fear the world, but another reason not to take good fortunes for granted. It always can be different.