Perspective (the Night the Tree Fell)

I had a blog post half written about our experiences with the tree through our dining room. And then Wednesday happened, and people lost everything, including their loved ones, and any damage we sustained seemed suddenly so ridiculously insignificant by comparison. A rug? A table? A couple of weeks in a hotel?

Not much, when you've seen the footage of that breathtaking hammer of destruction making its deliberate way through a city you love and friends' hometowns, picking away lives, homes, neighborhoods, the very fiber of the places, and leaving rubble in its wake.

So after all, I have little to report. My husband, my children, my dogs, and I are all present and accounted for, no worse for the wear unless you count a fading circle of rug burn in the very center of Katherine's forehead from when she tried to fly off the bed. Unless you count Alex's newfound anxiety about bad weather, which remains thus far in the realm of healthy respect and not the haunting paranoia that I grew up with and which would require more than calm amateur weather lessons and hugs and assurances.

Assurances, which, it turns out, are generally pretty empty. Some things are just too big, too powerful, to protect each other from.I guess that's my own scar. That, and my recent tendency to eye the general tree population with suspicion and distaste. (For the record, I was nowhere near Toomer's Corner.)

Two weeks in the Residence Inn taught us how to live on top of one another without resorting to violence, and two weeks living in my parents' basement left the dogs fat and happy. There was cabin fever, mainly for the almost-6-year-old who is used to being able to run in and out at will. There was crankiness from all corners but mainly from Katherine and me, who both have a hard time adapting ... a trait slightly more appropriate for the 10-month-old than the almost-33-year-old. The good old RI saw us through Steven's modest birthday party, Easter and illness.

When the latest and most severe round of storms crashed into the state and pieces of other cities started raining down outside our hotel windows, I took the kids and hid out in the bathroom. Alex was all eyes and questions ("Why isn't Dad in here with us?"), Katherine thought it was great fun. She found a plastic Easter egg and threw it repeatedly, endlessly, into the bathtub just to watch us retrieve it for her. Babies train their people very well.

I guess all of us (save Kat, who only seems concerned with her general physical comfort at any given moment, as it should be) were thinking back to that night, that comparatively insignificant storm, the suddenness with which hell, when it breaks loose, breaks loose.

There was little warning if you don't count the sirens, which we should have but didn't (we're those desensitized people they keep admonishing on the news, or at least we were. Now we'll pay more attention). There were some weird noises in the distance, coming closer, that we heard/felt, and I remember looking at Steven and both of us pausing to be puzzled by it, but just for a second. Because then the lights went out and our dining room exploded, and it started pouring rain on us. I don't remember running but I'm sure I was headed for Alex's room. Alex met me in the hall, trembling head to toe, straight from the shower, in his too-small, mismatched pajamas with his freshly washed hair plastered to his forehead and his hands grasping, squeezing, clawing at me, screaming, "What happened? What happened? What happened?"

And me, with my refrain of "It's OK, it's OK, it's OK," which was both a lie (I really didn't think it was) and not an answer to his question.

"Where's Katherine?!" Steven yelled from twenty miles away in the living room, and my heart stopped because for a split second my fear-distorted brain couldn't retrieve the information.

When it did, I ran in and grabbed her up from her crib, poor little oblivious thing, and she grumped at me for the rude awakening, and I squeezed her tight in one arm, with the other arm around Alex's thin, trembling shoulders in a death grip. I stood there in the hall surrounded by scared creatures (the dogs had apparently determined that I was somehow going to put things to rights) and feeling utterly vulnerable.

With the lights out, the house was pitch-black except for flashes of lightning that showed us just enough to know that it had been a near miss. Steven had been sitting at that computer desk, now covered in hunks of ceiling, support beams, and pink fluffs of insulation like the disemboweled remains of a cotton candy machine, a minute before if not less, cursing the bad luck that the power flashes had disrupted his progress on our tax filing program. I had been sitting at the dining room table scarcely five minutes before, going through a stack of junk mail mixed with important documents (no lectures, please, I KNOW birth certificates and such don't belong with long-expired coupon leaflets), looking for Katherine's social security card.

We had no working flashlight (note to self), and Steven was persistently searching through the rubble on the computer desk for his cell phone. It didn't even occur to me to ask why. (Turns out it was the only place he had our homeowner's contact information.)

And I think we could've been all right then if the burglar alarm hadn't gone off. There's no adequate way to describe the piercing wail that started out of nowhere and refueled our panic, but we ran outside onto the front patio without even thinking because that sound ... it's just not humanly withstandable. Bad for our situation, good for a burglary.

The storm had reached its peak by then and lightning was all around us, making the night bright as day and really simplifying our options into: get struck or go deaf. Getting into the car proved harder than it might've. Alex was terrified and refused to walk, and I don't blame him because I was tempted to ask Steven to carry ME. I ran through the rain in my socks and nightgown with Katherine in my arms and huddled in the back of the Trooper with her. Poor Steven was tasked with rounding up the panicked, confused dogs. Charlie jumped right in but Jack, always the holdout, required some coaxing. And it's not easy, coaxing a terrified golden retriever into the back of a truck in the middle of a tornado. Hats off to Steven for making it happen without knocking him out and throwing him in like a giant sack of potatoes.

We sought refuge at my parents' house, in the basement where I think Alex wanted to stay until he felt completely safe, maybe forever.

Looking back, I realize how lucky we were and also how lucky others weren't. The ones whose trees didn't stop at the dining room, or the ones who were in the wrong place at the wrong time like any one of us could have been. It's a retrospective nightmare, and I pray for healing for everyone whose towns, homes, lives were irreparably altered.

We're back home now, safe and relatively sound in our much emptier great room with its new scuffs on the wood floors, unhung artwork, and odd, unlived-in smell.

It's home, and I've never been more thankful for it.