Please allow me to share a back story with you first. It was so long ago, but I still remember…
The day started out beautiful…..
It was exactly 19 years ago yesterday, a day that I will never forget. A day that would stay with me for a very long time to come. Our daughters were very young at the time. Our eldest was 6 and our youngest was 4. At that time in my life I was babysitting a little 18 month old girl who I absolutely adored. The weather had turned off quite warm. So warm that we had the windows open in January! That seems to be not quite as odd these days as our weather pattern seems to swing from cold to warm in Tennessee. But during that time I remember it vividly….it was unusual! We had a fairly uneventful day full of playing with toys, reading stories and picking my oldest up from school. My husband was about an hour away working. All was quiet. It was getting close to time for Hannah’s Mom to come and pick her up and I went to the front door to look out. The sky had a very unusual green tint to it. I turned on the weather and there was the forecaster warning of impending bad weather moving our way. The phone rang and it was my husband just checking in and I nonchalantly asked him ” Hey if there is bad weather which place is the safest place to go in our house?” Having no basement he determined an inner hallway would be the safest. We hung up the phone. The sky grew very dark….I went around and shut all of the windows still not greatly concerned or scared. Another 10 minutes went by and the sky was black and ominous looking. I heard a knock at the door and Hannah’s Mom came in and said it looks bad out there is it ok if I hang around for a few minutes? It was right after those words that things became a blur…. it all happened so fast. We heard a loud thud against the side of our brick home. I have no idea what it was that first struck the house but it was enough that we all immediately ran to the hallway. Small babies and children in tow. Looking back now whatever it was that initially hit the house before everything else was probably instrumental in saving our lives. Falling in a crumpled heap on the hallway floor with little ones underneath me, knowing our daughters were in danger while our home exploded with glass and debris flying everywhere was literally the most helpless feeling I had EVER experienced. Knowing that if this entire house fell on top of us I could NOT protect my precious children was horrifying! I prayed like I have never prayed before! I knew without a doubt that I was at the mercy of something so much bigger then myself. The noise was deafening, the belongings of our life were swirling around and children were crying while two women were fervently praying. What seemed like forever but was probably only a minute or two finally ended and we all got up from our hiding place. The children were all unharmed. Thank you Lord!!
Afterwards things seemed like they happened in slow motion. Like one of those old Twilight Zone episodes, I opened a door and what used to be a room of my house was a pile of rubble. I felt like I was in an alternate universe. Shards of glass littered the floor and were embedded in the walls like shimmering ice encompassing a tree branch. I placed our youngest daughter on a couch that oddly enough had a statue of Jesus blown onto it from a nearby shelf and looked for some shoes for her little bare feet. Miraculously the phone rang, I was surprised it even worked, and I was given some bad news that my only Grandmother had just passed away at the very moment that the tornado came across our home. The shock getting deeper I managed to phone for help to my parents as my husband couldn’t be reached. The phone would soon lose service. I am thankful I was able to call for help. After locating shoes for little feet I ventured outside.
It looked like a war zone….
If you have ever survived a natural disaster you will probably completely understand this because words can not adequately describe the feeling of walking outside right after a tornado devastates the area you live. The neighborhood had an air of familiarity, but yet looked like somewhere I had never been before. People were checking on others, they were looking for beloved pets, neighbors belongings were hanging in trees that were still left standing. Our dog was totally gone along with any sign that we ever had a dog. Someone else’s dog was actually in OUR house along with someone’s mail laying on our table as though someone had just checked the mail after work and thrown it there to read later. Our solid wood fence was gone and I would later find 3 foot spears of this fence stuck inside the walls of our home only a couple of feet from where we were crouching. It looked like a war torn neighborhood that you only see on television. Across the street from my home there was only a foundation left standing where once an entire house was sitting. Vehicles were totaled and power lines were everywhere. The only way out was to walk on foot around the remnants of our belongings and live power lines. We waited for the firemen to get to us. We waited for family to get to us. We thanked God we were still alive. Never have I been so happy to see a familiar face then to see my husbands brother walking up to our disaster. He was the first one there and next would be my parents and then my worried husband who had to walk a distance to get to us due to everything being shut down for safety’s sake.
What do we do now?…….
It’s amazing how quickly life can change. How quickly material belongings can disappear how even quicker you come to realize that it doesn’t really matter about any of it as long as those that you love are still here. In about two minutes time we lost our home, our cars, a great deal of our belongings and my beloved Grandmother. Nothing really prepares you for that especially when it happens so quickly you barely know what hit you! Still in shock and also thankfulness that our children were fine and we had a roof over our head thanks to family, I boarded a plane to attend my grandmothers funeral. I barely remember it and feel bad to this day about that. She deserved more honor and for me to be focused on her life but yet everything still seemed like it was suspended in time. My mind was filled with a whirling jumble of flying debris, babies crying, seeing my husband again afterwards and what will we do now? My neck started to hurt and grew worse over the time I was out of the state and by the time I was on the plane heading back home I felt as though I couldn’t hold my head up without help. After getting home I wanted to see the house, my husband tried to cajole me to go to a doctor but due to my stubbornness he took me to the house and showed me something where I had been crouching. A door and the frame was laying over that space where I had been laying during the storm. The door contained a dent with my hair in it. I hadn’t even realized I crawled out from under my bedroom door and door frame! That adrenaline rush is something else! The doctor would reveal that I had a case of whiplash and so I began my treatment to heal the injury that I didn’t even know I had until days later. I’m thankful that’s all it was and know it could have been much worse then that. Little did I know that there would be something else that would affect me greatly after that……I wouldn’t know it was lurking there until the next storm……
Dealing with Fear part 2 tomorrow.
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