The House of My Youth

Part 12 - Storms

Back when I was young it seemed we were constantly beset by fierce thunderstorms. Some people called the area where we lived Tornado Alley. Of course the tornadoes we get in Minnesota are nothing compared to what they get in Oklahoma. I've seen pictures of those monster things down there. Some are a half mile wide on the ground. We seldom get anything like that up here, although it does happen at whiles.

For all the storms, though, The Old House remained standing. Many of the trees suffered. Mighty oaks felled by horrific straight line winds. We would climb on the skeletons until Daddy either brought someone in to cut it up, or borrowed a chain saw and did it himself.

I remember one year, perhaps a year or two before the house burned. It was Helvie's birthday party and everyone was there except Daddy, who was working. All day I had been watching the clouds. They were gathering to the north and I was warning everyone that a storm was coming. Everyone told me I was out of my mind. Storms didn't come from the north. They came from the west. But the clouds were coming. Surely they saw? They did. But preconceptions had them convinced it was nothing to worry about.

Not that it mattered anyway. There was no place to hide from a big storm in The Old House. The only real shelter was the root cellar, about fifty yards away. But even that wasn't safe. Should the roof be torn off the people inside would be exposed.

The storm took it's sweet time in coming. It didn't arrive until after sunset. Thus we didn't actually realize how bad it was. The television was off by reason of the party. (That was kind of an unwritten rule in our house. No television during family functions.)

When the kitchen window blew out we still didn't put two and two together and get four. We got twenty-two, and so we remained unconcerned. Mother grabbed a blanket and had me hold it over the window while she nailed some lathe boards over it to hold it in place. The blanket was bowed in like a giant watermelon. And then we heard it - the sound of a train.

Now hearing trains in The Old House was nothing new. The tracks marked our property's western border. But this wasn't the normal rumbling sound we heard, which shook the entire house. This was like a whistle, blowing off in the distance. Mother told me to listen. Then she said it was a tornado.

We stood silent and still for several minutes, as though that was going to do any good. Then the sound faded away. It had skipped us. Tornadoes do that. They jump. Forward, backward, and sideways. You can never count on what they're going to do.

We finished boarding up the window and then went to the big room, where everyone else was sitting and talking, oblivious to what had just occurred. When Mother told them, Dave, Lynahr's husband, laughed about us trying to lock out a tornado with blanket.

"Ain't no tornado going to get in here," he said, and we all laughed.

That's the cool thing about my family. They were often cruel in their teasing, and totally unsupportive of a person's dreams, but they could laugh off all forms of stress. Maybe that's why most of us have lived so long. I don't know. I do know this: Sometimes you just have to laugh.