I'm not happy with the number of hads in this paragraph. I'm sure it will drive Seams nuts : ) Aside from that, I need to rework the sentence that includes open-faced plastic dollhouse. I know what one looks like, but I'm not sure I've captured it here. Any other advice is good, too.
Toilets seemed to rise above what used to be homes, but had been reduced to piles of garbage. Some of the houses escaped total collapse, but their fronts had been removed leaving some of the rooms intact, and reminding me of an open-faced plastic dollhouse, fully furnished, although the furniture was scrambled some. Aluminum siding had been sharply ripped from the homes, but was still attached in places. It looked as if the twister had served as an old tin can opener that no longer worked, and had required so much effort that only half the can had been opened and what remained attached was bent back with a fork. I wondered what had happened to all of the colorful things that surely had been present in the area before the tornado. It was as if the twister had selected what to remove and took the good stuff, leaving mostly objects of gray and brown behind. Though I’m sure there was more color to be seen, I saw only two colored things among the trash, a doll whose plastic pink body stood out amongst the garbage, and a red wagon.
While my family was chattering about how lucky we were to have narrowly escaped living there, I was watching a little girl pulling a red wagon down the street, wondering what exactly she hoped to find in the rubble. Was she looking for her toys? Were her parents safe? Did her dog get sucked up into the sky and travel to some faraway place like Toto from The Wizard of Oz? The girl looked determined with her knobby shoulders rounded out small, and stretched backwards at the sockets, as she gripped the wagons handle and used both tiny hands to pull it behind her. I couldn’t tell if the girl’s head was hanging low because of the effort it took to pull the wagon, or if she was lost and scared. I thought she was too little to be among the debris by herself and wondered why she was alone. I wanted to get out of the royal blue Monte Carlo and help her, but knew there was no way Mom would let me. I placed my left cheek and my right hand on the glass window of the car to cool off the emotions that seemed to have swelled from within my heart, traveled through my body, and came to rest on my face, making my cheeks hot, and wondered why such horrible things happened. I watched the little girl through the back window, until I could no longer see her, while my family stared straight ahead looking for our house.
