WHEATLAND - A hilltop is illuminated by workman’s lights shining from an upstairs bedroom at the Reyer’s home. The bedroom’s outside walls are gone. The workmen are trying to secure what’s left of the roof so it won’t collapse onto the unsteady home below. Still, Kristin Reyer is thankful.

“I was really worried about my mother,” Kristin says. “I got here about eight in the morning and I couldn’t find her anywhere. She rode out the storm in the basement.”

Kristin found her mother, but her cats are all gone. She hopes to felines find their way back to the Wheatland home which will almost assuredly have to be torn down. Her father built the house.

While the Reyer’s home was all but flattened by Monday’s tornado, homes just a few doors away were seemingly untouched. The contrast is tangible evidence of the random wrath of the storm.

Bruce Lash’s next door neighbor’s home was fairly lifted off of the landscape and returned in pieces. While Lash’s own home endured significant damage, it is comparatively intact.

“When I look across my yard, I’m amazed,” Lash says. “So many of us are amazed because there could have been serious injuries and deaths from this storm, and there weren’t.”

Outsiders might survey the debris field here joined by paths of destruction and expect to find residents similarly broken, but they are not. Many of those residents will tell visitors they are blessed.