Storm Season

The chopper box is flipped upside down, on the barn room – but the roof is gone – and the haymow is gone, too. This is not normal, not normal at all. This is what my parents didn’t want me to see? Ok. Yeah, this is scary. And it’s raining.

It’s more scary to see Dad cry, to run the front door and into the bedroom.

“It took the whole damn thing,” he said. THAT’S scary.

Dark nights pushing thunderstorms around that suddenly fall silent. That’s still scary.

“It.” “It” took the whole damn thing. I’m five. What is “it?” Candles burn. It’s dark outside. A fire truck backs up the driveway, the driver leaning out the door, in his tan firefighter jacket, trying to maneuver the truck backwards.

Now, I would ask, “Who drives a fire truck backwards?”

I’m certain the tan firefighter jacket is fabricated, the part of the memory that I’ve recreated to patch the gaps, so the memory makes sense, so that it all makes sense.

Back to “it,” this “it” that makes Dad cry. This “it” that brings a fire truck, red light flashing, to our driveway, in the night.

We sit on the floor, my three-year-old brother and I, huddled in blankets. It’s weird to be in blankets in the dark, on the floor, especially on this spot of the floor. “It” has us here.

1984. June. June 4 … or maybe 6 or 8, the beginning of my five-year-old summer, just before kindergarten, only I don’t know what kindergarten really is yet. By the end of that summer, I would board the bus by myself, Grandma watching, as Mom and Dad can’t be there.

All thanks to “it,” this “it” that I don’t understand yet, still wrapped in blankets. No one is explaining anything to us, even as the fire truck rolls backwards passed our dining room window, then passed the kitchen window.

At the time, Dad was 31 or 32, my age or younger. I now understand the fear, the need to cry and run into the bedroom, that split second where tragedy either topples you or you topple it.

For a few seconds, my dad toppled. “It” took him down.

I still don’t know why the fire truck arrived. There was rain, no fire. But what do you do when something like this happens? You call 911. In the country, you then wait, and a fire truck comes … for “it.”

Who was more scared that night, Dad or me? My fear was ignorant. I didn’t know what to be afraid of, but the instinct of fear settled into me, the first time my fiver-year-old chest realized fear in its unbridled, threatening form …  the kind of fear that can hurt you.

Dad’s fear was reality-based fear, gained from seeing the hard facts – destroyed barn, farm machinery in the form of a chopper box now propped upside down on hay bales once covered by the barn roof. Destroyed tin shed crumpled like sheets of paper tossed around the lawn. The silo now stumped to ten feet, the other forty feet of former height swirled around the pasture. Dad’s fear was rooted in BIG CHANGE, that unexpected kind of change you never imagine because you don’t know it’s possible. Then it’s thrust upon you. He couldn’t say yes or no. “It” didn’t give him a choice.

That night, neither of us knew what would come after “it.”