Battered by Wind

It’s the anniversary of 9/11 and the world-shattering consequences that so many of us remember, whether it was the images that played over and over on television, or the talk of what our world was coming to.

I’d been at Bible Study that morning and heard the news on the way home. Sarah, who was home from school with a bad headache, had seen the news as it played over and over. Not an enjoyable way to celebrate her 16th birthday.

We watched the startling pictures on the screen once together as she rested tearfully on the couch. I turned off the television and announced we were going out for ice cream and we could celebrate with friends on another day. She needed a distraction, not that she or anyone could forget. We would learn later that one of our other daughter’s friends had been scheduled to be at the Tower for a meeting that morning, but he’d slept through his alarm. Thankfully.

 
Recently I had reason to watch a video that was circulating on Facebook, an anniversary of the tornado in 1979.

At the time, my husband and I were living in Waterloo region with our two young children, who were 3 years and 6 months. We learned that the tornado had taken out homes, barns, power lines and trees in Oxford County. Where I grew up, and where my parents and two youngest siblings still lived.

When we learned of it, we tried calling but couldn’t get through, likely because the power was out. My husband said we needed to go and check on them, and so we drove out to see trees fallen across roads and people already at work clearing the road.

My parents and younger siblings were shaken but otherwise unharmed. The barn had lost its entire upper story and trees in the yard looked like battered toothpicks.

I can't recall exactly what my parents said, but they knew something was eerie when the storm was still as they sat eating their evening dinner. My parents each grabbed a teen and headed for the basement of our farm home and made it just as the house got a good shaking.

Talk about the force of winds that picked up a barn door that had taken eight men to hang, as it was flung about like something light. The tornado had hit the barn first.

Neighbours lost home and barn but fortunately none were killed, though there were some injuries. The video spoke of emergency services and a community supporting each other. The effects of the tornado changed some lives significantly. Homes and barns can be rebuilt while the human spirit needs to work through the losses such a storm inflicts. And they came through it, emerging on the other side changed and perhaps stronger.

I pondered this phenomenon and wrote about it some time ago, how the human spirit emerges in such a situation, as it also must have following the 9/11 attack. Different forces at work and how people make it through, sometimes leaving us with more questions.

We Don’t Know the Storm

We don’t reckon the damage done until it passes

and all the storm took with it

boards and rafters, roofs and feathers

but more than that   lives changed

by that one moment

or what seemed like one moment

when things broke loose in the wind and rain

when it scattered boards and roofs like children’s toys

we hurried to the cellar for safety,

prayed while it shook the house

asking God to keep us safe

and now we live with ever after and what if’s

what if we’d known better what God and the storm could do

what God, after the storm, can do

 


Carolyn Wilker is an author, editor and storyteller from southwestern Ontario.
https://www.storygal.ca/
https://www.carolynwilker.ca/