It’s not the thunder, it’s the wind

April Moon Day 6

One thing I won’t miss about Arkansas are the storms. I remember when we used to have rain, now it seems all we have are deluges.

Thunder makes me jump, but strangely,although I run around the house unplugging all our computers (or ask J to do it if I’m out) I search the sky for lightning.  Watch it and  then count until  I hear the thunder and divide by 5.

And I always think about one of the two times I was in a tornado. Once I was in school and it went on so long we had to eat lunch in the hallway. It wasn’t as fun as that sounded , it was scarier with bullhorns and keening winds.

The other time, when we still lived with my father in Fort Smith, a tornado staggered through the neighborhood , landing in one backyard then skipping one and hitting the next. Technically it hit our neighbor’s yard, but put their tree in our yard and took the shingles off our roof. My dad went from room to room opening some windows and closing others. We had a large window. For just a minute he took me out of where we were hiding, and I can’t remember where we were, and let me see the grey clouds like stretched and ink stained cotton wool twisted in the sky. It was eerily quiet and then a noise at once so piercing and heavy that you didn’t hear it, you felt it. And then we were hiding again.

The next day our dogs were safe, the house needed a lot of new shingles and a few windows, we were missing chairs and a tree but we had an amazing fort in our back yard in the form of the neighbors large old..oak? tree sideways across their fence and halfway into our yard. I’d drape a blanket on a higher branch and take my book and sit there for hours. Sometimes taking a pillow from the couch for my head when the heat made me drowsy.  That was the best fort and better still because I could see the tallest branches that I’d never have reached without the help of the tornado.

There was something good that came of that horrible storm. At least a small good thing, at least for us. There’s something to be done with that thought, but it’s slightly more complicated than just a silver lining.