Friday, February 15, 2008, 14:17
The Darkest Dark
This week I started a series of interviews for the local newspaper. I am privileged to be able to talk to people who survived the F5 tornado that destroyed my hometown 50 years ago this coming June. At that time, the Fujita scale had not yet been invented, but by the damage patterns, the National Weather Service has determined that it was an F5 (the worst tornado there is).
I also am going to be talking to rescue workers and to people who helped clean up and rebuild the village. In all, 12 people were killed in my hometown. I don't know why there weren't more people killed because so much of the village was flattened and reduced to rubble. I was born several months after the tornado, but one of my classmates was a baby at the time who was blown out into a field. I am also going to be talking to the man who found him covered with mud and carried him back to safety.
The lady I talked to on Wednesday, now a resident in the nursing home, said there were angels in my hometown that night, and I believe it. The tornado hit at a little after 7 p.m. She was in the car with her husband and a friend of theirs when the tornado struck. Her husband was pushing on the brake as hard as he could to try to hold the car. Their friend opened the door a bit and was sucked out of the car. Then the Oldsmobile was lifted from the rear and flipped, end over end, for 400 yards. Both the lady and her husband were thrown out of the car. When it was all over, he was on one side of the road and she was on the other. She said, just before the tornado hit, that it was the "darkest dark" she had ever seen.
The lady said her hair was standing straight up and was packed full of dirt. Her husband had suffered a broken arm and his face was so cut up that it looked like a road map. The friend who was sucked out of the car lived to tell about the experience. Their friend said he was a few feet off the ground and was being turned over and over, and that ever time he came around, he thought he would be dead. Later on, her husband was photographed for a Red Cross poster.
It was several hours before they could be taken to the hospital. Trees were down all over the place, and they had to clear the trees from the road before they could drive through town. Rescue workers commandeered station wagons to take people to the hospital.
The lady said once they reached the hospital, doctors and nurses kept coming to look at them, would gasp and put their hands up to their mouths. Hospital staff were unable to wash her hair, she said, because she was so bruised and battered. Even a gynecologist came to see her, curious, I guess, to see what a tornado survivor looked like. She told him she didn't need his services.
In all, three or four tornadoes struck this area of Wisconsin on June 4, 1958. Several dozen people were killed and hundreds more were injured.
As I said, I am privileged to be able to interview the people who survived the tornado and those who rebuilt the town. Their stories are so important, and they need to be told and preserved in a permanent form. We will be holding a memorial service on June 4 of this year at the local high school, and all of the stories and pictures that have been gathered will be made available in a special booklet.
Mistaken identity
The other night, we had pizza for supper. Katerina-Ballerina-the-kitten made her way across the sink to the lone piece of pizza left sitting on the pizza pan.
"Little boy," Randy said, picking up Katerina, "you should not be eating pizza."
"That's Katerina," I said.
"Little girl," Randy said, "you should not be eating pizza."
He set Katerina on the floor and turned to me.
"I'm telling you -- you have *got* to glue an 'H' and a 'K' on their heads so I can tell them apart," Randy said.
I don't imagine it will be too long before Randy will be able to tell them apart at a glance. Henry, little tom cat that he is, is growing by leaps and bounds.
We don't have any trouble telling Dora apart, though. She's the little black kitty with soft, silky medium-length hair who just loves to get up on your shoulders and purr. Randy says she got in line twice when they were handing out purrs.
Duke update
I think Duke is slowly coming around. His hemoglobin level was only half what it should have been when he was tested a couple of weeks ago, so I imagine it is going to take a while to build up his bed blood cells again. He is eating a little bit more than he was. And he is more alert. It might be my imagination, but I think a tiny bit of color has come back into his ears as well. When cats are anemic, their ears become deathly white on the inside. And he is purring regularly when I pet him or when I brush him.
It is interesting how a person will grasp at straws when she is looking for signs of improvement.
LeAnn R. Ralph
Monday, February 11, 2008, 21:59
Pleasantly Surprised
You might know that the weekend we have a meatball dinner planned for church is the weekend that it would be so miserably cold. And not only cold -- but the little bit of fluffy snow that fell during the week ended up packed so hard from the cold wind that you couldn't hardly shovel it.
We canceled church Sunday morning because it was so cold, but of course, we still had to go on with the dinner. We couldn't very well call everyone in the local telephone book and tell them the dinner was canceled.
Randy went to the church about 9 a.m. Sunday to shovel out the steps. He said the snow was packed so hard he had to chip it out. It took him 20 minutes to shovel about 10 feet, and he had to go inside three times to warm up while he was shoveling. I know from my own experience it only takes a few minutes, even with gloves and chopper mittens, for your hands to get so cold they are numb when you are holding onto a shovel handle in a 40 degree below zero Fahrenheit windchill. The sun was shining on Sunday, though, so that made it seem a little more cheerful. Not much. But a little.
In spite of the cold weather, about 80 people showed up for dinner. At the same meatball dinner last year in February, we served closer to a 150. But still, 80 people was really amazing. I'm not sure what it is about meatballs and mashed potatoes and gravy that makes people brave cold weather to eat, but they showed up. We froze the leftover mashed potatoes and are planning to make potato soup when it is our turn to host the Lenten service and serve lunch afterward. In this part of the country, there is only one church event when we do not serve lunch and that's after the Maundy Thursday service during Lent. Otherwise, we serve a lunch of some kind -- even if it's just coffee and cookies. People expect it. We operate under the theory of "feed them and they will come." It's not just church events, either. It's any kind of event around here.
(At the moment, Henry-the-kitten is head and shoulders through the venetian blind, batting at the window. It's sunny today and the Asian lady beetles are crawling in the window. I hope the blind can hold up under the attack. Okay, now his sister Dora is getting into the act. Never a dull moment.)
By the time we got the kitchen cleaned up Sunday afternoon and got home, I was quite worn out. I'm hoping that the virus I've been fighting for the past week or so will be ready to give up pretty soon. I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.
When it was time to feed the horses later Sunday afternoon, Randy and I had to shovel out the path to Isabelle's pasture. Since the wind was from the west, the paths, which run north and south, were drifted shut. Ordinary snow shovels were no match for that packed snow. We had to hack away at it with straightedged metal shovels. There's a bigger one and a smaller one. Randy picked them up at the dump a while back. (One man's trash was Randy's treasure) The straightedged shovels worked very well to chip through the snow. Still, even with both of us working at it, shoveling the paths took more than a half an hour. Under regular conditions with snow that's light enough for the snow shovel, I can clear out both of the paths by myself in 10 minutes or so.
While we were chipping and heaving and shoveling, Kajun and Isabelle were running back and forth, besides themselves at the prospect of getting their supper. I kept telling them that we had to be able to get *to* them before we could *feed* them. Saturday night I struggled through knee-deep snow in gale-force winds (the snow wasn't frozen hard yet then) to bring more hay and water and grain to Isabelle, and it wasn't much fun.
The brutal wind eventually died down during the night. Monday morning, the air temperature was 14 degrees below zero, but it didn't feel so bad without that Arctic wind blowing right through a person. And of course, the sun was shining during the day on Monday, so that helped make it feel a bit warmer.
I hope this isn't one of those winters when we still have snow in the shady parts of the yard in May yet . . .
LeAnn R. Ralph