So how does climate change relate to the pandemic? A lot of smart people are having that conversation on a global scale. I don’t know all the answers to this question.

I do know, for damn sure, how those two crises related on March 24 on my hallway floor.

For most of that Tues, I fretted over my 4 year old’s birthday cake for later that week. We were only 1.5 weeks into schools being shut down. My extroverted preschooler is usually obsessed with knock knock jokes and trying to stand on her head.

During her birthday week, though, she was quieter, sadder, & angrier. She sobbed the week prior when we told her that her first sleepover party was indefinitely postponed.

I decided to make her birthday awesome anyway, and fixated on the cake as a route to 5 year old bliss.

So when the weather warnings beeped across my phone, I didn’t notice, and I didn’t check the news that day. Since I didn’t go anywhere due to social distancing, I didn’t run into anyone in my neighborhood who might have told me that tornado season was starting unexpectedly early.

It's not commonly known, except to locals, that Northern Alabama is a tornado alley. We get several each year. An even lesser-known fact is that most houses in this region don’t have basements due to underground geology.

Folks who have lived here a long time have stories about when a major storm ripped through a thoroughfare in the heart of our city about 2 decades ago. Some large churches were taken down to the ground, along with houses in the surrounding neighborhoods. I didn’t live here then.

I grew up in Florida, where we had hurricane season. I was accustomed to the occasional disruption – my entire first semester of college was nearly cancelled – and power outage. However, we always knew well in advance when a big one was headed anywhere near us.

Tornadoes, I’ve learned since I moved here seven years ago, whip up fast. You don’t have time to run to the store for a few essentials. You may not even have time to get inside a building.

I had just finished icing the cake – which was a masterpiece – when the horns went off.

The tornado horns only go off when the official warning level reaches the level of “warning.” Warning is a higher level than “watch,” which is when conditions are determined by meteorologists to be right for the formation of tornadoes. Warning means take cover, right now.

It often means that a tornado has already touched down nearby, so get in your basement with your family and a flashlight and all those other things that you are supposed to have ready for when a tornado comes.

When you don’t have a basement in your creaky old 1960's house, you go into the hallway because it is the only area without windows (although there’s one at the end of it, so you put yourself in between that window and your tiny children).

When your brain is tired because there’s been a global pandemic crisis this week, you forget to grab the flashlight and the box of tornado stuff that may not be restocked since last year, you’re suddenly not sure.

Maybe you look for your shoes because you heard stories about the Nashville tornado a couple of weeks ago. You think you might need shoes if your house collapses and you have to walk to get help.

When the rain and hail pick up speed and your child asks if she is safe, you tell her yes while making sure that she has thick blankets “to be cozy” but really you’re thinking about flying glass.

Then there is a deafening boom and the power goes out, and it is so dark that you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Your already stressed-out nervous system launches into a full panic attack and your heart literally jumps, skipping beats irregularly.

You take deep, shaking breaths while stroking the silky hair of the tiny head in your lap.

Logically, you know that it’s just electricity. You have heard no crashes through the roof or windows, but your mind isn’t ready to believe that you are physically OK.

Scenes race through your mind, of trees crashing through your body as it covers your child’s, of pancaked neighborhoods, of limping through debris while other people run away from you in fear of catching a new kind of coronavirus.

Then a thought arises, fully formed: this is reality now.

When the wind and rain die down twenty minutes later, the texts start to ping from neighbors and friends.

Jokes are cracked about the weakness of the storyline of this season of our lives – not believable, no Emmy this year, fire the writers.

Breath returns slowly. Flashlights and candles are found. There is cursing about the uselessness of frozen pandemic supplies without power.

My family was lucky this time. We wrapped some birthday presents by candlelight, but our power was restored within a day. Two days later, it seemed like everyone around me had already forgotten it had happened.

But I can’t get it out of my mind.

As weird and difficult as social distancing may be, the Internet and videochats are a portal into connection with the wider world.

For a day, they blinked out of existence, along with refrigerators and freezers. Meanwhile, we still had to maintain the quarantine.

How would we have coped if we had also lost property and lives to a tornado?

Anyone who is inside the climate movement knows that climate change is going to have permanent effects on local weather events. In my area, as in many others, it will mean more tornadoes, along with more droughts and floods.

So how can I pretend that climate change has paused until we have dealt with Covid-19? It hasn’t.

My grief over our newest crisis is tremendous, and I don’t yet know all the ways that it will touch me personally before it slows. My climate grief is a journey I’m still on.

This means I have to figure out how to survive, heal, and grow more resilient as I process those griefs. Then I have to act.

Because 2 weeks ago, I held my tiny daughter in pitch dark as wind and hail beat on our windows, and the only thought in my mind was “we aren’t ready.”

Inspired by @MaryHeglar tweets about relevance of climate change & discussions w @amywestervelt on @RealHotTake