Watching the Grass Grow
Surviving a Tornado and Other Things That Happened This Week
Saturday afternoon the tornado alert siren went off on my phone instructing us to take cover immediately. Go to the basement. Stay away from windows. Find the most interior room in the house. I usually ignore those warnings, but within minutes the world outside turned dark. Then, with no transition, rain and wind moved past the windows sideways carrying everything not robustly fastened to the ground.
Almost immediately the power went out.
I guess this wasn’t one of the to-be-ignored warnings. The National Weather Service has now confirmed that six tornadoes touched down in my area of western Pennsylvania during the storm. One of them touched down just down the road in Star Junction where the Dairy Queen roof was partly blown off.
I got home from work around eight that evening to a house filled with candles and my dad sitting on the couch. We were both still full of adrenaline. My dad and I love storms and, despite the damage, there was a shared excitement about the whole thing. We compared notes and traded stories about what we’d seen. Eventually we gave up on the power coming back on and went to bed.
Sunday morning I drove into town early to buy ice before everything in the refrigerator spoiled. We packed coolers and tried to save what we could.
It was sunny and warm with blue skies like nothing had happened. Along the roadsides, though, the damage was impossible to miss. Trees were down and limbs were scattered everywhere. Branches hung tangled in power lines. We had received a notification that power would be restored by 11:00 that evening. After the coolers were packed and the errands were finished, and since we had no way to cook breakfast, we decided to head back to Bad Rabbit for coffee and food.
The people there recognized us immediately and seemed genuinely excited to see us again. We ordered breakfast, drank our coffee, and lingered for a while before heading back home.
My dad and I ended up sitting outside on the front stoop in the shade for nearly two hours. We didn’t talk much. We just sat there, as they say, watching the grass grow. Then a flurry of white butterflies drifted through. They twisted around each other in the air and I wondered whether they were playing, fighting, or mating. I honestly couldn’t tell. From a distance I suppose all three look pretty much the same.
As the morning stretched on, I started noticing there were butterflies everywhere. The white ones continued drifting through the yard. Larger brown butterflies floated past. Spring azures flickered in and out of view. Bees moved from clover flower to clover flower. Flying insects I swear I’d never seen before seemed to appear out of nowhere. Three cardinals passed through. Then a pair of blue jays. Robins hopped through the grass pulling worms from the ground. A red-winged blackbird landed on the telephone wire and flashed the bright patch on its wing. A rabbit emerged near the edge of the yard, paused for a moment, and disappeared back into the grass.
The longer we sat there, the slower time seemed to move.
At one point my dad pointed toward the sidewalk where a huge spider was making its way across the concrete. It was one of those absolutely ferocious garden spiders covered in fur with fangs so large they appeared to scrape the sidewalk as it walked. The second I leaned forward to get a closer look, it shot into the grass like a lightning bolt. I told my dad that the thing was trying to get in the house, which made him laugh.
By Sunday evening we still didn’t have power. The 11:00 restoration estimate came and went. The lights didn’t come back on until the following evening.
My dad and I headed into town for dinner at The Cactus. The lights were on. Every bar stool filled. The televisions were running. It felt good to be somewhere that wasn’t dark. After dinner we played a few games of pool. Back in the day, my dad was really good. Dementia may have taken a lot from him, but he still had it. I managed to win one game, mostly through luck, but he took the rest.
Later that night we sat at the kitchen table playing cards by candlelight. Every now and then one of us would hold a card closer to the flame before laying it down while shadows moved across the walls. We played hand after hand until it was time for bed.
This morning I’m sitting in a hospital waiting room while my dad has an outpatient procedure. Preparing for it became its own project. Certain medications had to be stopped beginning five days beforehand. No food or drink after midnight. With dementia, “no food or drink after midnight” isn’t quite as simple as it sounds. Before going to bed I taped large handwritten signs on the refrigerator, the coffee pot, and the pantry reminding him not to eat or drink anything.
My dad, like me, tends to get up in the middle of the night to graze. Every once in a while our grazing schedules overlap and I’ll find him standing in the kitchen in his pajamas looking for a snack. He’s always a little disappointed when he sees me because it means he knows I’m watching.
This morning, on the way to the hospital, the car in front of us suddenly slammed on its brakes. A deer came running alongside the road darting one direction and then another as though it couldn’t decide where it wanted to go. My dad watched it through the windshield and said, “That deer must have so much anxiety right now not knowing which way to go.”
There was such sincerity in his voice when he said it.
As I sit here in the waiting room, I keep returning to that deer. The more I think about it, the less it sounds like he was talking about the deer.
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