Every year, the cool air from the north and warm air from the ocean dance together violently across the southern United States. The winds spin recklessly across the flat farmland, the mountain foothills and the gleaming beaches, tossing lightning, hail and rain in every direction. Sometimes they spin so fast they lift the life below straight off the ground.
I grew up with tornadoes. When my brother and I were very young, my mother would make storm sheltering a game -- she would turn our little closet under the stairs into a wonderland of pillows and blankets, treating us with ginger snap cookies to distract us from the scary red gashes making their way across the television screen. Once, our middle school morning bus broke down as the sirens went off. My mom raced to the bus and piled as many kids into the car as she could fit, taking us to school because we’d be safer in the cinderblock building than at home. When we entered the building, the pressure difference sucked the Lost and Found box straight out the door. Thanks to the storms, I spent more hours in school hallways than I can count, all of us lined up like little soldiers during a bomb drill, hunched over with our backs towards the ceiling and our arms covering our heads.
Over time, one gets used to the haunting yowl of sirens and the sickly green clouds. I became curious, fixated on the phenomena that so frequently warped my normal routine. I was obsessed with the movie Twister. One time I watched it twice in a row in one day, and that night we had a tornado warning. As I hunkered down in our tub, I wondered if I had tempted the fates with my brashness. But the destruction never came.
My life with storms was a series of close calls – the catastrophes they caused seemed far away, dwarfed by the distance created by the television screen. Until a tornado hit my city, Nashville, earlier this year while I was away on a business trip. I spent the night panic texting friends (who all were safe, thank God) and anxiously refreshing the news on my phone, each headline and accompanying photo worse than the last. Tornadoes are fickle things -- they hop and skip and zigzag all over, leaving some places in total destruction and others pristine. My husband slept through the whole event, only waking up to the sound of my strangled voice after the third call. He and our apartment were fine.
But so many other places weren’t. Favorite haunts were leveled and neighborhoods ravaged by the winds that screamed under the cover of darkness. People died. I came home to a city rallying behind massive relief efforts that would soon be stalled by a global health crisis. Several months later, wrecked houses and businesses still sit broken and morose, like forgotten skeletons in a tomb.
Throughout the year, more storms came. We brought in the plants and charged our phones, just in case. We located our shoes and grabbed essentials, placing them in an easy-to-find pile, just in case. We gazed out the window as the air became still and electric. I watched the storms move across the radar looking more and more like wounds.
The storms are a build up and release, sometimes resulting in destruction, sometimes delivering the wind and rain needed for growth. And that’s what 2020 has been, hasn’t it? A series of storms with varying outcomes, some good, some bad. As I sit in the days before a monumental election, I feel that familiar stillness, that electricity. Which will it be? Destruction or growth? And what storms will follow this one?