Tornado vs. Oak

There I talk of a Tornado in Atlanta tonight. I capitalize the word Tornado to give it respect. You see, a Tornado almost took my life once, but be it the will of the universe, sheer luck, or the tornado changing it's mind and rolling elsewhere, I was spared. I was three years old. My mother and I had just returned home from a shopping trip with my grandmother and cousin (actually, he was my uncle, but since there was only a year between us, I called him my cousin). It was a beautiful, amazingly sunny day in rural Manning, South Carolina. I still remember how blue the sky was that day. The air silent, and calm. I can remember being happy...

My grandmother dropped us off at our mobile home, which was on the edge of a long dirt road which led up to the house owned by the people we rented from. The mobile home was surrounded by enormous, hundred year old oak trees, trees that used to both intimidate, and shade me as I played beneath them. We went inside as my grandmother, with my cousin in tow, drove off down the dirt road. Almost immediately after closing the door, my mother noticed how windy it had gotten. Huge streams of breeze were gusting into our open windows, blowing items from their usual resting places on side tables, counter tops, and night stands. We could feel the wind physically moving us as we were stumbling around our home. My mother instructed me to help her close the open windows. I ran into my bedroom, climbed up on my bed and began cranking the window shut. As I was closing the window, suddenly I found myself hanging from the handle. A few quick jolts, and a slam. Chaos... noise... screaming. We had no idea what was happening. My mother stumbled to me, grabbed me and we began to run out of our home. Swinging open the front door, we prepared to bolt down the stairs. We stopped dead in our tracks. Our stairs were no longer there. Looking out we could see that they still sat where they always had, yet we were about 50 feet away from them. The Tornado had picked up our home and wrapped it around a tree while we were inside. If not for the protection of those intimidating oak trees, we may have flown farther, maybe flown to our deaths. Oak...capitalized.

Still unclear what was happening, my mother grabbed me and we leapt from the mobile home onto the ground and ran furiously towards my grandmothers car, still in the driveway. We could see the car was rocking side-to-side, literally balancing on two wheels one way, then slamming down and lifting onto the other two wheels. Still we kept running. We were being pelted by baseball sized hail, but still we ran, believing in the safety that lie in my grandmothers station wagon. We jumped in the car, still dazed, crying. My grandmother hit the gas and we sped towards the garage my father worked at, a mere mile or two away. I can still remember crying, screaming that I wanted my pillow and my Matchbox cars. It's funny what comforts children value...

We pulled into my fathers workplace. I can still remember the big grin on my father's face as he saw us pulling in to pay him an unexpected visit. My mother was incoherently screaming out the window the events that had just occurred. He tried to comprehend. When he had finally grasped what she was saying, he laughed it off, thinking it a joke. Where he stood, there was not a cloud in the sky, the ground was dry, and the air was still. It was not until we drove him to the debris of what was our home that he believed. There, surrounded by fallen, mighty Oaks was the rubble that we used to call home...

So you see, I owe my life to that Tornado, or maybe to the Oak. Did the Oak fight furiously to hold onto our home and our lives, while the Tornado fought and fought to take us as a souvenir of its journey through Manning? Was there a terrible battle, each vying for victory, for the lives that each held in its hands? Did the Oak win? Did the Tornado admit defeat, or just give up and move on? I'm not sure I'll ever know, but respect is given regardless.

Tornado. Oak. Thank you.

************************************************

The music that completes today's look is"Blow Wind Blow" by Alison Moyet.