Every part of the country seems to have its own kind of danger. Some people live with hurricanes. Some live with wildfires or earthquakes. Here in the Midwest, we live with tornado season, straight – line winds, and those black skies that make us wonder, is this the one?
When I was a little girl, my dad was the brave one in the weather. My mother and I were more likely to be inside listening to the radio and worrying, while daddy was outside watching the sky. He would be squinting into the rain and grinning. He adored weather in a way I don't think he would've admitted. A storm put a little lift in his step.
One June evening – June 28, I remember – we were trying to beat a storm and get the hay in. Daddy had taken his vacation, not to rest, but to do the haying. My dad cut and raked his own hay; then he usually hired it bailed into small round bales. I sometimes helped just a little bit at night by driving the old '47 pick up in granny low gear while he walked beside it , tossing bales into the truck. I loved doing that. My dad would stride along in the heat with hay hooks in his hands, looking almost like some young Titan moving through the field. I felt like I was part of a team that could not be squelched. We didn't do very many loads a night, but it was the highlight of my day. That summer, my mother had told him during his vacation she wanted the outhouse taken down— not a tidy little chore. There was more to it than knocking down that building. There was also the hole to deal with, and daddy had spent too many days looking forward to hay hauling to get that job done for mother. He was not eager to give up his haying time for anything else.
This storm, even my daddy came into the basement with us. We had those little, high basement windows that are hard to see out of, so daddy got a wood crate and stood on it in order to look out the window. All at once he laughed so loud and then just kept saying, "I've got a surprise! you're gonna get a surprise! we've got a surprise coming." Mom and I tried to guess, but we were wrong every time. When the storm passed and we came up from the basement, my mom saw it. That wind had taken the old outhouse clear away. Well, after that, the night before Mom's birthday, Daddy had to finish the job the storm had started
Storms were not my mother's finest hour. She was one of the most giving women I ever knew – hard-working, sacrificial, and good to people. But storms, mice, and snakes brought out what I can only call her little yellow tail.
When I was about seven, a dead mouse rolled out of a rug in the dining room, and the next thing I knew I had been shoved aside while mother got herself safe. She went clear into another room. Mom came back sheepishly, apologizing, but by then I was pretty ticked... For the rest of our lives that was a family joke: some mother pushing her child out of the way to escape a dead mouse. Years later when mother was in her 90's and on a walker, she called me to come up from my bedroom after I had moved in with her. She wanted me to kill something in her bathroom. I asked if it was a mouse. She told me it probably was a mouse. At that time I immediately decided it would be fun just to go get in the car and drive away. However, I had seen my dad working too many years on doing just exactly what my mother asked. There was no way that I was not going to take care of whatever request that was. Mom knew good and well it was not a mouse. It was a black snake.
By the time I got up there with my grandmother’s sturdy old cane, my mom was coming through the living room at a speed nobody knew she still had in her. She had the walker up under her armpits and was running with it, screaming, "Gayla! it's a snake! it's a snake! oh my Lord, it's a snake!"
I knew what my mom expected me to do. I knew what my dad would've wanted me to do. I took my grandmother's cane, and I went into that bathroom I pulled that snake out of the register where he was trying to get away, and and I beat the daylights out of him. Now, that was a different kind of storm, but it had about the same amount of screaming
Another stormy night after I had moved in with Mom, we decided she might need to get into the closet for shelter. Translation: mom decided she wanted to get in the closet. Now, our closets were full of everything, of course, but mom was little. She managed to wiggle herself in the closet under a shelf, and she sat down on a box of my son's toys. Well, that box gave away. I heard a little whoop, I looked in, and my mom's head was sticking up, her bottom was down in the box, and her legs were straight out. We had a terrible time getting her out because we were both laughing so hard. She did not want me to call my son to get her out of that box because she did not want anybody to laugh at her. Naturally, I told everybody. Naturally, everybody laughed.
That same storm took out a lot of trees. Some came from the front yard and went over the house and landed in the backyard, tearing up the roof as they went. When the insurance adjuster came, he said he didn't think we could count those trees and that roof unless the trees had stayed on the roof. My cousin's husband didn't miss a beat. He reached down toward the tree limbs and said, "OK I can fix that." So... we did get help with that roof.
That is how storms are, I guess. They are frightening and serious, and sometimes they leave real damage behind. They remind us how small we are and how little control we have. But after they pass, if we are fortunate, we also find a few stories to tell. The outhouse gone. My mother and the toy box. That walker with my mother making record time through the living room. My cousin quick to throw the trees right back on the roof if that's what it took. I also remember one hot, stormy night when my dad took the lava soap outside somewhere in the dark and took a shower in the rain. I always wanted to do that, but I don't think that's gonna happen in this lifetime.
But I kind of like Weather, too. I remember my father standing on that crate, looking out the basement window, brave and intensely curious. Alive to the weather. I remember my mother laughing when she saw that old outhouse gone. I remember the hay stacked just in time, the pickup crawling through the field, and the feeling that we had outfoxed the storm for one more night. Maybe that is part of living in storm country.
We respect the danger. We grieve with people who lose too much. We watch the sky. We listen for warnings. And when the wind finally passes, we step outside and count what is still standing.
Do you have a storm story you remember – a rainy night, a blustery day, or one of those strange little moments that happened because the wind came up?
