Flashback Friday: Writing Your Story One Week at a Time

 

            Well, friends, we have made it to Friday. What a day it was here in Indiana yesterday. I knew it was supposed to rain – and maybe even storm – but I had no idea it would be as severe as it was. I’m grateful that I made it home just before the worst of it hit, and I am grateful that Ryan made it home in time as well. Lexi wasn’t a huge fan of the booming thunder but managed to be distracted enough by treats to get through the worst of the storms. We had a lot of wind, some hail, and torrential rain, but we didn’t have any damage. A couple of counties south of us, there was extensive damage, and I am just sick looking at the pictures. ☹

            When we have stormy days like this one, and I think about our Friday topic of writing your story a week at a time, I think it’s important to look back weather events that shaped something about your life.

            Here in Indiana, the two weather events that shaped many lives were the Palm Sunday tornado (in the 60s) and the blizzard of 78. You hear about them every single year around the anniversaries of their occurrence. Both were before my time, but for many, their understanding of the severity of weather and the lasting effects it can have on life were shaped by one of those two events.

            If you are going to write about them, you might mention things like this:

·         What was the weather event and how old were you when it took place?

·         What was significant about it in comparison to other weather events of your lifetime?

·         How did you prepare?

·         How did you react?

·         What kind of damage did you have?

·         Were there injuries?

·         How long did it take to recover?

·         How did it change the way you look at weather events?

Though the first one I’m going to mention here was not a significant weather event in the grand scheme of life, it did make an impact on me! I was an 8^th grader when we had a really bad ice storm in the spring. We’ve had a decent number of ice storms in my lifetime, but this is one of the worst I can think of. The ice was thick and power outages were widespread.

We had a death in our extended family and the funeral was scheduled to take place about 3 hours from where we lived – right in the middle of that ice storm. (The bad weather hadn’t stretched that far, so everything went on as planned in that town.)

My dad felt like he couldn’t leave our house because of the power outage and the possibility of the basement flooding, and Mom felt like she couldn’t miss the funeral, which was for someone on her side of the family.

So she and I got in the car and drove three hours (which was probably much longer because of the slow speed we had to take) to that funeral. We stayed in a hotel overnight, which was such an adventure! It sticks out to me, because I so hate driving in bad weather, and I can’t believe Mom braved that drive!

I was in college – though home for the summer – when a tornado went through our little town right in the middle of a festival week. Mom and I had gone to the high school to watch a play and planned to stop on the way home to get an elephant ear from the street vendors. (Food trucks weren’t a thing yet. They were still street vendors.) They had all closed up shop because of pending bad weather, so we went home. We put the garage door up right before the power went out, and I think I had time to carry about three armloads of my worldly possessions to the basement before it was too dangerous to come back up for more.

My parents were true Midwesterners – out in the yard watching – and I was the responsible adult in the basement, sobbing over the potential loss of house and home. It went just north of us, and we were spared, but it shaped me and marked the beginning of my true fear of storms.

If you’ve read here many years, you’ll remember the stories of the tornado in my sister’s town years ago. That one really shaped me. Once you see – in person – the incredible destruction that can come from such a powerful storm, you have tremendous new respect for it.

Weather events are pieces of life that we can learn about from news archives, but chronicling personal reactions matters. That’s where the real stories lie. Like the day after the tornado in my sister’s town, I went out to mow the yard – mostly to take a break from the 12+ hour marathon of the Weather Channel I’d been watching to see footage of the destruction. I remember feeling so profoundly guilty for mowing the yard because I had a yard and they didn’t. I had to stop my work and come inside because I couldn’t handle the guilt.

Those are the stories that matter in remembering weather events. Those are the personal sides of life-shaping events.

How about you? Have you been shaped by a major weather event?