The Silence of a Sobered Morning

The local meteorologists were tracking the storm path with their usual euphoric chatter. The television was on, and then it went dark.

 

The cell phone tornado warnings alarmed in our hands, and then went silent. 

 

The air was eerily still, and then it wasn’t. 

 

The lights glowed beneath the angry sky, and then they didn’t. 

 

The generator kicked on. The chickens huddled inside their coops, not unlike us in our basement. 

 

The rains sheeted down, the winds snarled, and just beyond our reach, the tornado knifed its way through town, across the county, and then beyond.

 

And missed us.  But we were among the fortunate.  Nearby, seven people lost their lives.  I have to sit with that for a moment.  Lives.  Lost.  From a storm that passed perhaps a half-mile from our home.  We’ve since seen the power lines draping the roads; the carcasses of trees tracing the line.  We’ve since heard of horses moved from barns deprived of their roofs, businesses invaded by the elements, homes battered.  Families displaced.

 

Morning confirmed that Taproot Garden passed the night unscathed.  Not even broken branches.  We awoke to power restored, blue skies – a blank-faced, mischievous morning trying to act like it had not misbehaved in the night.  

 

I released and fed the chickens who were happy for the daylight.  I walked the dogs.  I watered the seed trays in the greenhouse and tried to pretend that this was simply another ordinary day.  But the pretense was deafened by the echo of the hollowness.  

 

I know otherwise.

I know the truth.

This is not simply another ordinary day.

 

Line crews worked through the night to retrieve dangling cables and to restore electrical service.  Road crews worked through the night to bulldoze trees off the roadways.  People picked through their rubble to reclaim the precious, the salvageable.  Insurance adjusters arrived early on the scene to begin the grim assessment of destruction.

 

And families, scissored by death, sat in silence, facing into the disbelief and the inexpressible, untraceable future.  

 

A half-mile away.

 

Anything but just another day.