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Diversify your portfolio. Rebalance it regularly. Exercise for at least 20 minutes per day, avoid trans fats and drink lots of water. Check your credit rating to see if any black marks have showed up. Test for radon. Wear your seat belt.

People in previous generations didn’t know as much as we do about guarding against danger and providing for the future, the poor souls. Now the answers are all available on the Internet, and each week the media will provide you with a new set of questions to ask.

Do all of this, and you should be fine.

Unless a monstrous funnel cloud drops from the sky and slices your home off the face of the Earth.

There’s no diet to get you ready for that.

If an otherworldly twister takes shape in your neighborhood but the mysterious forces of nature aim it one degree away from you, your life won’t change a bit. You’ll keep puttering along, worrying about your cholesterol and your 401(k). But if you’re ever in the way of its final approach, your life will never be quite the same.

Or maybe you’ll be even further away from lucky. Even though you did your crunches last night and said no to ice cream, maybe today a wall cloud drops a wall on you, and that’s the end.

There’s only so much useful caution available. The rest of this little adventure is pure chance.

Up in Parkersburg, a novel begs to be written. It’s just another small town in Iowa, but big things happen there. A powerful U.S. senator lives nearby. Four high school athletes have made the climb to the National Football League. And now it’s the place where Memorial Day’s sweet sadness has been replaced by the memory of terror, and it will stay that way for a generation at least.

Parkersburg takes its place in the history of summertime heartbreak along with Charles City, Belmond and the other tornado-struck towns of Iowa. Towns that were founded at the just slightly wrong spot 150 years ago. Kind of hard to predict every bad outcome over a time span like that.

The photographs last week looked like ads for the latest nuclear weapon, one with new and improved selectivity. This house stays put, and that one flies to pieces.

When a tornado strikes, it’s hell for those in the midst of it and strangely surreal for those who are off to the side, watching. During a war, you have bombs dropping here and farmers planting crops over there. A tornado is like that; here the sun is shining, and over there cars are wrapping around trees.

This is never going to change. Scientists have a research program under way for almost every problem, but nobody is figuring out ways to stop lightning, hurricanes, earthquakes or tornadoes. They don’t make laboratories big enough for that.

So we’ll just stumble on, relying on the oldest form of self-defense: wishful thinking.

It seems as if that should be enough defense against insubstantial air. You’ve felt the refreshing summer breeze and the bitter winter wind, and it’s all the same thing. Just air moving from one place to another, delivered along with the song of a bird and the morning mail. This machine runs without electronics or hydraulics, and overall it keeps the world properly arranged for your convenience. But sometimes it runs a little rough.

One day that same air starts whipping around at 200 miles per hour, and there goes somebody’s life.

Water is just water until it forms into a flood or a tsunami and turns human beings into objects.

Snow is just snow until it sends an avalanche down a mountainside.

Wind is just wind until it’s the devil at your front door. Then you realize that “home security system” is a bit of an overstatement.

The people hurt by the tornado of May 25 will get plenty of help. Financially, physically and spiritually, they’ll get what they need, because this is still a wealthy country, and this is still a neighborly state.

They’ll get back to laughter and petty remarks, and someday they’ll forget about most of the possessions that were blown out into the Iowa countryside.

But you know the special thrill that accompanies the approach of a summer storm? They don’t get to enjoy that ever again.