Surprise ending

I thought I was ever so clever yesterday. All-day thunderstorms had been called for the Cute Town I was due to visit with a little party of friends, so I tracked down another Cute Town none of us had ever checked out, and which was coincidentally the only place in the whole province scheduled for sun.

All day long my companions thanked me for my quick thinking, because it really was the loveliest of lovely summer days, with great scenery, many happy discoveries in the way of museums and parks, AND a charity shop where I found - drumroll please - a bag of vintage buttons. Sounds boring, I know, but buttons are a hot commodity for the average crafty person, and vintage ones are as gold.

The day was so lovely, in fact, we left it late coming back, and as traffic slowed on the highway, we put on the radio for traffic and weather updates.

And oh dear, it seemed the thunderstorms were now coming our way, fast, and came complete with severe thunderstorm warnings that were quickly upgraded to tornado watches and then tornado warnings (which are apparently a step up from watches and mean that one could happen at any moment.)

The radio people sounded terrified, frankly. One of them later said that she and others spent some time under their desks because of the wall of windows that threatened to break under pressure from the tornado they saw touching down outside their building.

And there we were in a car on a highway surrounded by other cars and projectile-ready construction materials, rain suddenly falling in sheets and huge lightning bolts and flashes appearing around us every few seconds, and the danger area being extended every few minutes to include us no matter how far we'd crawled since the last report. Even the meteorologist was saying he'd never seen a storm like this in his entire career.

And yet - we seemed only to follow the storm. The weather was bad, but not nearly so bad as what the radio people were describing from a mile off. They had black skies with zero visibility owing to the heavy rain, while ours were grey-green and wet but manageable. Apart from ten minutes' wait in the driveway before the lightning cleared up enough to let me get into the house again, we were entirely unscathed.

Just before bedtime, when I'd calmed down, I remembered my exciting button find. And I unpacked the bag, and you'll never guess what was in it.



The words on three are too worn to make out, but I knew what they were the moment I saw the safety pin that was holding them. See that gold one in the bottom right corner? The reverse reads:

St. Christopher
Our Protector
Guard Us
From Danger