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Of all the odd things that I saw on the morning of June 21, the one that will stick in my mind the longest is probably the free-standing panel twisted around a fence in our feedlot.

I stared at it several times that day, trying to figure out how it got where it was, halfway through the corral panel and somehow twisted both upward and downward, flapping in the breeze. It will be, forever in my mind, the symbol of the power and unpredictability of the weather. Looking at it, it was hard to believe that the evening before, we'd thought maybe the predicted storms would fizzle before it got to us.

On the evening of June 20 , my husband and I were sorting heifers when my youngest daughter started sending me messages from the old decommissioned iPhone she can use in the house: "Are you coming in?" "Mom mom mom mom." "I'm scared."

I'd instructed her to leave the TV on in case there were any weather warnings, knowing that meteorologists had been calling for strong storms in the evening. She'd worked herself into a frenzy before my husband and I returned to the house. We told her the storms she was hearing about to our west likely would calm down before they got to us. After cleaning up, I started making a quick, extremely late supper of grilled cheese.

But before the sandwiches were even half done, our phones and TV went off, alerting us we were in a tornado warning. A quick look at where the spotted cloud was and where it was headed told us we might be in the path. We spent a little more than half an hour in the basement before reemerging. The power had gone out. But we thought the wind would start to taper off before too long.

Instead, it picked up, suddenly and severely. We could hear debris smacking against the siding and made the quick decision to go back downstairs. We all huddled into our spare bedroom for the night.

Jenny Schlecht / Agweek

In the morning, my older daughter and I could no longer sleep and went outside to check things over. While we had known one barn had lost some tin and her basketball hoop had fallen over, what we found went far beyond what we could have imagined. Every building on the farm has some sort of damage, including our house, with a partially ruined roof and deep dents in the siding where debris flew. The two barns in the yard — filled right now with bottle calves and 4-H animals but very vital in calving season — both were missing much of their roofs, and rafters and tin were scattered throughout the yard. Our multipurpose working building — where we park machinery, work cows and store a variety of necessities — strangely had a garage door up that definitely had been down when we left it the evening before. The strong winds had blown through and damaged the opposite wall, leaving piles of insulation to clean up.

Jenny Schlecht / Agweek

There were corrals demolished, panels twisted, trees uprooted or broken off. Everywhere we looked, we saw problems, many we could never explain. That panel in the feedlot, twisted and broken, was the hardest to explain. The National Weather Service, using our photos and those of a neighbor, ruled that a tornado had gone through our farm.

But everywhere we looked, we saw blessings. We were all safe, as were our neighbors, who also had severe damage. We learned quickly, not everyone was so lucky in the storms that had stretched from eastern Montana all the way to Minnesota. The storms were deadly for three people in Enderlin , North Dakota, and multiple families in the region lost their homes. Our house was very much still standing and livable. Our barns, while likely damaged beyond repair, were in no immediate danger of collapsing, and the animals inside were only concerned with how long it had taken us to feed them. My husband's sister and her husband rushed three hours to bring us supplies to patch our roof and help clean up trees and other debris, and their children helped raise our spirits, just by being themselves.

I saw a meteorologist call the storms that blew through multiple states in the region a "once in a lifetime" event. I sure hope he's right. We don't need to experience anything like that ever again.