A Tempest in LaBelle

The sirens began when we were in the checkout.

Steubenville doesn’t have tornado sirens at the fire station, as was normal for me growing up in Columbus. The only way to tell if there’s a severe weather warning is to have the radio on, or to be in a public place when all the phones begin bleating at once. Adrienne and I were doing the payday shopping while Michael was at his shift at the restaurant. I was just swiping the bank card, when everybody’s purse or back pocket let out a desperate wail.

“It’s not a tornado warning, is it?” I asked the woman behind me.

She was already consulting her phone. “Severe thunderstorm with eighty mile an hour winds. It’ll be here within ten minutes!”

As we packed the car, the wind was swirling in a way it hadn’t been an hour ago. In the east, downhill by the river, the sky was gray and white. West, up towards Wintersville, it was black.

Our phones gave the warning wail again five minutes later, when we were halfway home. Adrienne fished hers out to look.

“High winds again?”

“Tornado warning!”

I couldn’t drive faster, but I gripped the wheel harder as if that would help.

Big, heavy drops of rain had just begun to pelt the car as we pulled up to the house. The son of the Baker Street Irregulars was playing football with his friends in the street; I shouted “It’s a tornado warning! Eighty mile an hour winds! Get inside and away from the windows!” and the boys fled.

After being food insecure all winter, I had just bought two hundred dollars’ worth of food to stock the house. The perishables went into the fridge just as the power flickered off– and then on again, before I’d had a chance to get angry.

Michael texted that the restaurant staff were sheltering in place but that his power was out, just as our own power blinked on and off once more.

It was then that I remembered the cat.  Charlie is an outdoor cat, a former feral cat who still scratches and bites if you get too affectionate. Her cat house is a sideways Rubbermaid box by the mailbox. That wouldn’t provide any shelter. But how could I possibly get her inside? I ran out once more, crying “Here kitty kitty!” which has never worked on Charlie once. The rain was not pouring down in sheets– rather, it was flying sideways, like sheets flapping slack on a clothesline.

The cat was hiding under the porch, and there was no getting her out. She was far safer down there than we were in the yard. Adrienne and I fled inside as the wind kicked up even harder. We’d barely slammed the door when the power went out again. And again, it came back on.

We ran to the inside hall by the basement door, and that’s as far as we got.

Rain hit the glass on the windows like machine gun fire. The windows upstairs, which have thick clear plastic stapled over them for drafts on the old shrunken frames, slammed whump whump whump whump, rhythmic like a bass drum. Outside there was a crashing noise from the bowels of hell, and it was black as night.

For a moment I thought about the Three Days of Darkness prophecy that had terrorized me in my youth. I realized I wasn’t afraid of that anymore. I was only afraid in an ordinary way. Not of demons, just of dying. No, not even of dying. God could sort things out for my soul if I died. It was the moments before death that worried me. That was an ordinary fear. This must be what it’s like to be a normal person with an ordinary set of fears, instead of a traumatized person who grew up in the Charismatic Renewal. And yet, I still believed in God. Healing from my trauma hadn’t taken God away. God was still here. Now I could discover Him in the real world, instead of the fantastical world I had been taught was real– that is, I could if I survived the next hour.

Of course I didn’t die, but the storm did.

About fifteen minutes later, the rain fell down instead of sideways. The sky went from black to yellow-gray.

When I opened the door, Charlie popped out from her hiding place and rubbed against my leg. She, Adrienne and I went around back to survey the garden. The tomato cages and the pea trellis were slumped over. The Man Who Brought Water‘s gutter was broken. His wood fence was blown to the side like a gate left open, but his house was unharmed.  Jimmy’s yard was littered with branches from the old tree with the tire swing, but his house was intact, as ours was.

Michael hadn’t texted again, so I drove to the restaurant to make sure he was also all right. All around LaBelle, trees had been ripped out by their roots. Some power lines were down. Some of the one-way streets were impassible. One parked van had been smashed nearly in half by a gigantic oak.

The restaurant was back open, and the parking lot was already packed with people wanting dinner, since power was out in all the rural areas outside of town. Michael didn’t have more than a second to tell me he was staying late because of the crowds.

I stopped at the store on the way home, and bought a lettuce seedling for the garden.

It felt like magic, planting the tuft of green in the freshly watered ground.

It felt like safety.

It felt like being home.