Listen to Your Mother!

Once a month we set aside all work and appointments and do our best to give our full attention and love to our grandkids.  Last weekend was our Grand Weekend and was it grand! The weather was perfect so we filled the kiddie pools, removed the cover to the sand box, and dusted off the swings.  We laughed and splashed and dug and hugged until we couldn’t do it anymore.  A day and a half later, we dropped them back off with their parents, exhausted and loved. 

Because we were so very tuned in to the grands, we weren’t so much with social media, the television or radio.  In fact, it wasn’t until late Monday evening after grocery shopping and returning back home that I sat down to run through any messages I may have gotten for the past two days.  I kept seeing over and again the condolences to the people of Moore, Oklahoma… and then I heard what had happened.  On a day when I sit comfortably in the back yard of our farm, with wind blowing through the willow and our grandkids giggles wafting up into the warm sunshine, others were laying on top of their children trying to save their lives. 

Makes you think. Not only about life and death and what to be thankful for and appreciate today, but also the warnings we receive and the loved ones who do their best to keep us safe from harm.  I remember when I was about seven. My brother and I and my mom lived in an apartment right next to our elementary school.  There in the middle of the apartment was a walk in closet.  And whenever a warning would ensue because a tornado had been seen, my mom would grab a mattress and throw it on the floor of that closet and tell both us kids to get in there and stay in there.  Then she would go gather drinks and snacks and a transistor radio and she would return, shutting the door behind her… and we would wait.  Sometimes for hours.  I remember asking her over and over if we could go now and her answer was always the same: “Not until the warning is called off.  I want you safe.”  So we waited.

Later when we were teens and lived out on Willis Road next to my grandfather’s farm in Saline, mom would gather us all downstairs in this small cinder block encrusted room, and again we would wait.  The older we got the more belligerent we got toward her.  We made fun of her paranoid fanaticism and basically hung tight only because we didn’t want to be grounded if we left… and be stuck indoors even longer.  But the reality for her… well, it was deeply engrained in her mind. 

She would retell the story of Palm Sunday, 1965, when 47 tornadoes hit. It was the second-biggest outbreak on record at the time. In the Midwest, 271 people were killed and 1,500 injured (1,200 in Indiana alone).  The tornadoes occurred in a swath 450 miles long and 200 miles wide. The outbreak lasted 11 hours and is among the most intense outbreaks, in terms of number, strength, width, path, and length of tornadoes, ever recorded, including four "double/twin funnel" tornadoes.  28 died in Michigan (wikipedia.com).  One or two F-4 tornadoes struck Milan, south of Saline.  One tornado destroyed the Wolverine Plastics building on the Monroe County side of town (then, the top employer in the village), completely removing the roof in the process. Another then struck and seriously damaged the Milan Junior High School and the adjacent, disused (since 1958) senior high school.  My mom’s uncle lived there and on that day, she was in Milan.  She remembers hearing the deafening “freight train” as it came through “taking porches off houses on both sides of the street at the same time, as it ran down the yellow line.”  I was two. 

We will never truly revere weather and its power until we have seen it unleashed on humanity in its fullest rage.  Live life to its fullest, for sure, because we never know when our time will come.  Pray for others who have endured loss.  But most of all, heed the warnings and believe your mom when she says she is just trying to keep you safe.