“I think you should pick up Daniel from play school,” my husband said to me over the phone. “There’s a storm on the way.”
I didn’t see any signs of a storm. But since Dennis had insisted, I drove to pick up three-year-old Daniel, taking along eight-year-old Drew. By the time we got back home, 10-year-old David was doing his homework. Although the sky was gray, the weather wasn’t looking all that threatening. What had Dennis been so alarmed about?
I had some phone calls to make before dinner, to remind women of a meeting at my house the next morning. As I dialed, I looked about contentedly. The antique dining table and chairs had been polished to a fine glow. I’d taken out our best china, crystal and holiday napkins, and arranged them on the orange linen tablecloth. I felt proud of our nice house and all our fine possessions. Thanksgiving was one week away. How much I had to be thankful for!
As my first call was answered, the lights began to flicker. On the other end of the line my friend said, “Debby, the storm is here. We should get off the phone.” We hung up quickly, and I called the boys to help me go through the house and turn off lights and unplug appliances.
Suddenly the power went off. The house was plunged into darkness.
I took two candles from my Thanksgiving centerpiece, lit them and herded the boys into the den. But as we stepped in the doorway, both candles abruptly went out.
And then I heard a terrible roaring outside, a thumping, like a high-speed train thundering over joints in the tracks. A tornado!
“Run to the bathroom,” I told the boys. “Run!”
David took off, and I stumbled after him, shoving the two younger boys ahead of me. By the time I got to the bathroom, David was already facedown in the tub. I rushed to open the window, as I’d been told to do if a tornado struck, and as I shoved it up, the wind sucked the slatted blinds completely out through the opening. Now the noise was unbearable.
Drew and Daniel had run back out into the hall in a panic. I went after them, pushed them down and threw myself over them. “Pray, kids,” I cried. “Ask God to protect us.”
There was a deafening explosion. My long hair was lifted upward. Pellets of some hard substance stung my body, and my mouth was filled with the taste of dirt. A strong smell of pine burned my nostrils.
And then everything was quiet. We lay there, too frightened to move, until I dared to open my eyes and look. Over my head the sky was filled with wild slices of lightning. The roof was gone.
Daniel and Drew squirmed beneath me. “Help me get up,” I said, hugging them both. There were three doors just over our heads, and in a flash of lightning I saw that a big bureau from one of the bedrooms was now next to us in the hall. We kicked and dislodged the doors enough to crawl out.
“David!” I called out. “Where are you?”
No answer.
In the bathroom, all I could make out was a mound of bricks, ceiling tile and insulation. David could have been sucked out through the window just the way the blinds had been! I screamed his name.
There was a rustle, then a crash of plaster. Under all the junk moved a leg in red jogging pants. “Mom, I’m okay,” a voice called.
All that remained of our house was the small uncovered space, about 8 by 10 feet, whose walls surrounded me and my children. We’d been shielded from the flying debris by the doors that had fallen over us.
Through the driving rain I could see that other houses were still standing. Electric wires hung like spiderwebs. But no one was stirring.
We picked our way through chunks of brick and pieces of wood, across the street to the home of our neighbors, the O’Donnells. With both fists I beat on the door.
From inside I heard a muffled voice, then Martha swung the door open and we grabbed each other and clung together. She and her children had been huddled in a closet. We stared in disbelief at our neighborhood. Many homes were damaged, but mine was completely destroyed.
Slowly other neighbors came out. Rescue vehicles arrived. Dennis drove up and rushed to throw his arms around me and the boys. Together we surveyed our property—what was left of it. In the debris I could see the shattered remains of crystal and china, the splintered remnants of antique furniture. I was devastated. “Dennis, there’s nothing left!” I wailed, bursting into tears.
Still in shock, we went to Wal-Mart to buy some dry clothes, and I got a look at myself in a mirror. My hair was matted and almost gray from the insulation, glass fragments and pine needles that had blown into it. (Before hitting us, the tornado had roared through a grove of evergreen trees.) Dirt was ground into the pores of my skin.
“We were in the tornado,” I explained to the cashier. “Will you take a check?”
“Sure,” she smiled. “Why don’t you make it out for a little extra? You folks can probably use the cash right now.”
We were dirty and wet, but the clerks could not have been nicer. The manager kept the store open past closing—and gave us a discount on all we bought.
From there we went to Days Inn, the first motel we found that still had electricity. The desk clerk promptly advised us that we would be their guests at no charge.
From the motel I telephoned Charles Freeman, our pastor, and told him of our plight. His first words were, “What can we do for you? What do you need?”
“We need people to help us go through the ruins to see what we can salvage . . .” I told him, my voice breaking.
“We’ll be there,” he promised.
By 8:15 the next morning our friends from church had arrived, along with my husband’s coworkers. Soon some three dozen volunteers were sifting through the mess that had once been our home.
The women at church cooked us a hot dinner and arranged a place for us to stay, stocking an out-of-town friend’s house with everything we’d need. They outfitted us with clothes and purchased backpacks so the children could go back to school.
Strangers came with fruit baskets, casseroles and cookies, pans and kitchen utensils. They brought us clothes and even remembered to bring hangers. A friend, knowing of my love for cooking, gave me a complete set of pots. One brought me a purse. “Every woman needs a purse,” she said. In it she put a pair of earrings, a lipstick, a scarf, and a handkerchief attached to a note that said, “Debby, this is for all those tears.”
As friends and neighbors came forth to lend and give us plates and eating utensils, even the simplest cracked dish looked wonderful. One family even gave us a dinette set they were no longer using. I looked at our beautiful antique dining room furniture lying in splinters and thought how grateful we were to have that dinette set.
We all went to my father’s for Thanksgiving that year. It wasn’t the kind of big to-do I’d been planning the week before, but it was the best Thanksgiving we’d ever had. How much I had to be thankful for!
