Windy Weather
Tuesday night I lay in bed and tried not to think about the wind. The news said there could be gusts of up to sixty miles an hour. Sixty! It took me a long time to get to sleep, and sometimes I’d be almost there and a gust would whoosh me out of it, into a cold sweat, and I’d try to breathe deeply to calm my heart, which was suddenly racing.
Over-reacting, you say? Perhaps. But here’s the story…
When I was twenty-five and staying overnight at my folks’ in the second-floor bedroom where I’d grown up, we had a storm. Not just any storm. This was a good ol’ Indiana tornado.
I remember my mom calling me in the middle of the night, telling me to get up and come downstairs. I jumped out of bed, barefoot and in my jams, and started down the hallway. Before I reached my folks’ bedroom a crash of breaking glass stopped me cold, but in a few moments I continued on to the end of the hallway, and down the stairs with my mom. We arrived on the first floor to find the side door to the house swinging open , and my dad on the floor under a doorjamb, hands over his head.
My memories of that night are pretty foggy from that point on, but I do remember after the storm had passed, when daylight came. Our living room was full of leaves. Most of the hundred-year-old trees in the front yard were gone — some having dropped huge limbs which destroyed younger trees growing underneath them. And the upstairs hallway? Shiny with shards of glass from the tree branch that had crashed through my parents’ bedroom window moments before I’d passed it.
My feet didn’t have a scratch.
The next day the yard was filled not only with branches and leaves, but with good-hearted neighbors who hadn’t seen as much damage. Folks with their trucks and chain-saws and well-wishes. We hadn’t lost the house or our lives, thank God, but seeing those gorgeous trees destroyed was heart-wrenching. They’d been around longer than any of us, and it hurt to see them in that condition.
When my husband and I put the kids to bed this Tuesday night I told him it was good I didn’t have to sleep on the second floor with them, or I’d never get any sleep that night. The wind, whistling at their windows, didn’t phase them.
But there I was, in my first floor bedroom, listening to every breath of wind and feeling it into my bones. Eventually I got tired enough I went to sleep, and when I woke, it was with relief, to find that the wind had subsided and we’d survived.
Maybe someday I’ll get over this fear of storms.
But then again, maybe I won’t.
Until then I’ll just keep the weather radio close at hand, and always be ready to carry our sleeping children to the basement during a tornado warning.
And I’ll pray. A lot.
