Not in Kansas

It’s been three weeks since THIS happened to the barn.

It was a perfectly gorgeous, sunny Saturday…afflicted by a wind so fierce it nearly bent the trees double. Today has been wind-ravaged too: none of that gentle breeze stuff, but real, face-slapping, gale-force, roaring wind.

But compared to Friday’s storm outbreak across the Midwest and South, a little roof damage is nothing. My heart goes out to the families who’ve lost loved ones and homes, who are picking up the scattered pieces of their lives. It is nothing short of amazing to see that what took years to build can be obliterated in a matter of seconds.

My favorite fictional stories are ones that feel deeply-rooted in their settings. I want to have all my tactile senses engaged and for the moments that I’m between the pages of that book, I want to be there, whether there is Atlanta or London or some backwoods town in Montana. And you can’t set a scene without taking weather into account.

Nature’s wrath brings people together and pushes them apart. It strips away hubris, leaving behind only courage and determination. Storms are a universal source of fear and awe, of respect and even, at times, admiration.

In the South, the worst weather always seems to strike at night. When it’s dark and the lightning is highlighting eerie green patches in the sky, we huddle around our TVs and radios, and we pray for our homes, our families, our barns, our animals, and yes, ourselves. We pray that the tornadoes that dive down out of the clouds like dark tentacles won’t take too much this time. The destruction is random: untouched houses sit beside unrecognizable piles of rubble.

And when it’s all over, and the sun is shining again, we tell stories about the time we sat huddled in a basement with a motorcycle helmet on our heads, hoping the piano upstairs would get sucked out of the house rather than come tumbling through the floor. We talk about watching the funnel descend on the other side of the barn and running hell bent for leather, breathless, dragging a mare along beside us and hoping the three-day-old filly at her side kept up. You laugh at the memory of stubborn husbands, fathers and sons who aren’t “scared of a tornado” and who waited until the last possible moment before ducking for cover.

There are funny stories about kissing dirt at the bottom of a roadside ditch while a whole bunch of nothing went on around you. Then there are harrowing tales of bravery and near misses. Tragedies and seeming miracles. Sometimes real life is more exciting and more terrifying than fiction, and we pass the tales down to one another, proving that in this day of technology, oral storytelling tradition is still very much alive.

Whether the weather is transporting you to Oz, or forcing you to spend a few hours killing black widows with wasp spray in your underground tornado bunker, Mother Nature has a way of forcing herself into all of our stories.