Stormy Weather

There's a very touching look today on TV at the Hurricane Sandy destruction area, one year after the hurricane. Seeing the area and how much rebuilding still needs to be done is heartbreaking, as are the stories of the survivors who are moving on without loved ones. But as always, there is praise for the way the communities came together in disaster.

I've been fortunate that I've never lived in a hurricane area. I saw some powerful storms come in off the Pacific when I lived in Oregon, but nothing of hurricane force. But between Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Indiana, I've seen some significant tornado damage, blizzard damage, and straightline wind damage – to say nothing of floods.

When I was a kid, it seemed like tornadic weather always happened at night. We had a storm cellar just outside our back door. Unfortunately, we couldn't take that short route in stormy weather because the electrical line came from the pole to the house right over that back door and we didn't want to walk under it. It just seemed like a long walk off the porch and around the corner of the house when you'd been rousted out of a deep sleep.

There was always such a sense of urgency to get to the storm cellar, but you always made sure you were dressed, shoes on, and maybe a sweater or jacket. The storm cellar wasn't fancy – it was just basically a hole in the ground with steps going down to it. Some people had electricity in their cellars and a light, but there wasn't any in ours. We stored the jars of fruits and vegetables Mom had canned in the cellar, and there was a wooden bench down there.

There was a storm drain at the door going into the cellar, but something in the change of atmospheric pressure seemed to always make it clog up during storms. So, if it rained really hard, there would be water on the cellar floor.......cold water. I remember one dog in particular we had who was very afraid of storms. He would always follow us into the cellar, wade through the water, then jump on my lap.

We always made sure we stayed in the cellar, uncomfortable as it might be, until the weather completely settled down. In fact, I often remember not coming out until the stars were twinkling in the sky. On one really memorable night, as we exited the storm cellar we looked to the skies – very, very high up, there was a seemingly tiny, perfect funnel cloud that slowly broke apart and dissipated as we watched.

We never had any tornado damage, though we did have straightline wind damage more than once as a result of the storms. I can remember a couple of times when the TV antenna was blown off the house, as well as a few random shingles. That wasn't major. What was major, though, was the barn. When I was small, we had a good-sized barn with three distinct areas: a section with stanchions for milking cows, in the middle was a corn crib and storage for feed, and then there was a larger area good for containing cows about to calve, or small calves.

The first time when the wind cause issues with the barn, the feed area and calf area were blown down. For reasons we never quite understood, the milking section wasn't touched. It took awhile to clean up that mess. I helped as best I could when Dad rebuilt that end of the barn......just one long section, open on the long south end but hooked to the original barn on the west and north and east walls, with a tin roof.

It may have taken almost as long for him to ease the milk cows back into the barn for their twice-daily milking. They were really spooked by the looks of the post-storm barn and refused to get near it. Dad would coax them as close to the barn as he could, then do the milking as best he could in the pasture. That's not usually recommended, to milk a cow without having them held in one position! With a lot of patience, Dad finally coaxed the cows back to the barn and milking continued as usual.

A few years later, we had a repeat in another storm – that rebuilt section was blown down and had to be rebuilt. We were getting good at it by then! At least the look of the barn didn't change enough to spook the cows, so Dad didn't have to deal with that. I always imagined the cows clicking their rear hooves together, mooing “there's no place like home, there's no place like home”!