I’m sitting in Cairo with the air conditioning set to high, looking out the window onto a panorama of reddish dust and traffic-clogged streets. I have errands to do, but need convincing to brave the sweltering sun, the tiny blinding particles, the eerie weather that marks the season of the khamaseen, the sandstorms that plague much of the Middle East this time of year.

One Web site’s definition of the khamaseen is “a cyclonic wind which is common in Egypt” every spring. The choking feel of the air calls to mind tornado season in Oklahoma, my birthplace and my mother’s home state. I just returned to Egypt this week after a brief visit to attend my youngest brother’s graduation from the University of Oklahoma, my own alma mater.

Several nights while I was there, the winds whipped into cones and threatened to turn deadly. The weathermen got excited over the images on their Doppler radars; the Storm Trackers made famous by the Oscar-nominated movie “Twister” readied their equipment. Rain fell in hot spurts from a fickle sky.

Cyclonic winds, I think as I gaze out the office window, and present-day Cairo is replaced with the memory of another spring in another place: Moore, Oklahoma in May 1999.

That year, a rare F5 tornado came from a gray-blue sky with such ferocity that our lovely brick-and-stone home never stood a chance. My mother’s china, the delicate plates we were never allowed to touch, shattered into tiny pieces. It was also the year I graduated from journalism school at OU, and my storm-battered family sat through commencement in clothing from Goodwill.

The winds had taken it all: prescriptions and passports, Qurans and Bibles, expensive Bedouin textiles my mother collected from Saudi Arabia, star-patterned quilts my great-grandmother from Texas patched together early in the last century. Our baby pictures and birth certificates were strewn clear into the next county, maybe even all the way to Kansas.

The next day, when the air was still and the black wall cloud had given way to a peacock-blue sky, National Guardsmen stood watch over the ruins. Martial law was imposed on our sleepy little suburb of Oklahoma City and only families who could prove residence there were allowed to return. Already, there were tales of flashlight-toting looters picking through debris for wristwatches, home safes and anything else they could cart off while the electricity was still out.

We trudged through our own knee-high rubble, steeling our stomachs against the stench of dead pets that already had begun to waft over the site where our house once stood. Our family had been spared casualties and, grateful, we fell into a state of awe over the force of a storm that could level blocks of our neighborhood in such a strange zigzag that a house on the next street still had potted plants hanging from an intact wraparound porch.

The local Baptists came to pray for us, to remind us that God rebuilds and to sing “Standing on Promises.” Friends, co-workers and delegates from our mosque dropped by to deliver black plastic garbage bags filled with cast-off clothing. Satellite trucks arrived bearing pretty anchorwomen who checked their lipstick before going live at 5 from the wreckage; someone told me a photo of my family’s swampy-looking lot had appeared on the front page of USA Today.

Like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, so many people had cared about our loss, I can’t help but think as images of other people’s rubble flicker across the office television here in Cairo.

This week, Israeli air strikes flattened a Hamas compound in the increasingly volatile Palestinian territories. Insurgents flattened yet another police station in Iraq. U.S. air strikes flattened suspected Taliban hideouts in Afghanistan. More scenes of twister-style wreckage appear onscreen: from the bombing of a 17^th-century mosque in India, from a blast in Sri Lanka, from artillery shells pounding militants in northern Lebanon.

And, then, this from a wire service: “A severe windstorm uprooted trees and electric poles in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, killing three people and injuring 13, officials said.”

Rubble is rubble, loss is loss and violence is violence. Somehow, though, it’s just a little easier to forgive Mother Nature.