Mother Nature certainly showed us who was in charge when she gave us “Earth Minutes” on Good Friday.
I can’t ever remember having been as frightened as I was on that day.
I had just finished shopping on Old Fort Parkway when I called our accountant to see if I could drop something off, and the receptionist asked, “Are you SURE you want to bring it NOW?”
I said, “Why?” And she said, “You’d better check the weather.”
The voice on the radio said: “If you’re in Murfreesboro, take cover NOW.”
I was in front of Quality Furniture Company. It entered my mind that it was on a slight rise, which frightened me, but I didn’t have a choice. I entered the doors to what looked like a ghost town and no one in sight. All the employees were under their desks. At their insistence, I took immediate cover under a steel desk in the middle of the store, but not before I looked back through those double doors to see a funnel cloud square in the middle of them.
I still get a knot in my stomach when I think of that. I guess I always will.
The wonderful employees at Quality had a big screen TV following the storms, and when the newscaster said it passed, we exited one by one to question the fates of our families, homes and pets.
Fortunately the cell phones had not begun to jam, and most of determined the (happy) fate of our kin.
At the televisions urging, we braced, again, for the second swell ... back under the desks again.
I left after about an hour, but I “bonded” with those pleasant employees of Quality Furniture. A lot of bonding happened on that date.
Citizens certainly bonded hours later when volunteers showed up on their doorstops to help in any way they knew how.
When my husband Tommy told me of the death of a young woman and her baby who perished at the corner of Sulphur Springs Road and Haynes Drive, I said, “The baby was a girl and it was born about two months ago.”
I knew that because I drive by that corner three times a week and had happily noticed the pink sign from the Medical Center announcing the birth of a baby girl at that home.
Sublime happiness to ultimate tragedy.
After Friday’s experience, many of us will never take life as we know it for granted again.
My only inconvenience was losing power for a day. I can only begin to imagine how people cope with losing everything, including life.
When we stood on the banks of the Stones River at sunrise services on Easter, the sun rose over the water and dabbled through the trees. It was beautiful.
You could sense that everyone else on the hillside felt it, too.
I thought about the families who had built homes from scratch, planning floor plans, picking out carpeting, drapery and paint colors about how they had prepared nurseries for sons and daughters; pillows for pets, organizing bins for Christmas gear and documents for income tax ... all swept away in a few short minutes.
How do you rebuild that? How do you start from nothing and make something out of it? One brick at a time, I guess.
I said a silent prayer that everyone facing this ends up correcting things they didn’t like before and comes out better in the long run when all is said and done ... if that’s in any way possible.
And to all of you facing that, the loving thoughts and prayers of a whole community are with you all.
‘Til next week. |
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