Cyclones

(www.ohmycavalier.blogspot.com)

"There's a storm blowin' up, a whopper, to speak in the vernacular of the peasantry" ~Professor Marvel, "The Wizard of Oz"

Spring holds on late, a month late, with its claws. My cosmos seedlings and spirals of morning glories beaten down by wind and flattened by rain. Our grass finally burst into frog-green color and grew a foot high in the space of one afternoon, impossible. I try to write and the words stammer out a sentence at a time, slow as a clock chiming midnight, slow as the counted pause between the lightning and the thunder. Always, there is the weather.

When the tornadoes came yesterday I watched them on television. They are visible proof of emergent properties like collective sorrow or speaking in tongues- they are living, breathing, angry symbols of wind+earth. The sky yellows and hail comes sideways. We make preparations to run to the car- what to grab? Cameras, computers, my backpack with the flash drives. I think of all my photo albums- the baby pictures, the holidays, the gardens. I think of the carved pig from Morocco, the vintage cookbooks, the row of yellow-spined Nancy Drews, tiny pink shells from Vieques. What do you take? What is precious to you? More, what is irreplaceable?

(Chickasha, Oklahoma, May 24, 2011)

We get to the university just as the wind begins blowing debris over the car. My umbrella blows inside out. Our clothes are soaked. Half the town is inside the Student Union, in the basement near Crossroads Restaurant. I see: crying babies, a girl hopping on her pillow, a pair of border collies, an old man wearing Ray Ban bifocals, students from Hong Kong. I smell: the gated Starbucks, wet dogs, the heater coming on, whiffs of ozone everytime the front doors are opened to let another soaked person inside. We watch the televisions, we stare at our phones.

After the tornadoes, I find that the squash has a blossom.

If another storm doesn't come...