A Strange Wind Indeed
This is a fictionalized version of a story straight from my life.
It was a beautiful sunny day.
The baby gurgled in Anna’s front pack. She carried the basket of freshly laundered clothes on her hip out into the yard where a clothesline stretched between trees. There was no wind, zero, but it was warm. The sun would dry everything before noon. She smiled, enjoying the task and her new role as mother.
A slight breeze whispered against her arms, not even enough to push the clothes she’d pinned on the line. It was still sunny with no storm clouds in sight on the horizon, but she went back and pinned them more firmly, just to be sure. As she secured the last pair of jeans, she looked up and was bemused to see high wispy white clouds zooming across the sky in the opposite direction from the still-negligible breeze on the ground.
“Odd,” she thought.
The baby pulled her hair. She made a face at him and he laughed. She left the basket by the clothesline and walked to the house with him, ready for playtime. She put a blanket on the rug and played with him most of the morning. He giggled when she zigzagged back and forth behind a towel, playing peek-a-boo.
When he made sucking noises she nursed him to sleep, then put him down in his crib in the back bedroom. She watched him sleep peacefully for a few moments, basking in the joy of motherhood, then went out to check on the clothes.
It was still sunny and the breeze had picked up just enough to help them dry. Even the jeans were ready to bring in. She folded clothes warm from the sun, then carried the basket inside. She put away the baby’s things last, careful not to disturb his sleep.
She was folding the blanket on which they’d played when she thought she heard a train.
“Odd,” she thought. “There’s no track near here. That’s what they say a tornado sounds like.”
She stood holding the front screen door open, looking each way from under the cover of the porch. The day was still sunny and bright. Then the tall pines across the street began to bend. She watched, mesmerized, as the trunks uniformly reached a ninety-degree angle.
Suddenly, they snapped upright and she was thrown back into the house. She ran to the bedroom, where the baby was still sleeping peacefully. The hatch to the ceiling had been lifted up into the attic. All was quiet.
She went out to find trees on the ground like spilled and broken matchsticks.
A neighbor from the trailer behind them came running. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, that was a strange wind, wasn’t it?”
He looked at her in disbelief. “It was a tornado. We heard the warning on the radio and were in the ditch watching… it was headed straight for your house. It must have hit the pond behind those pines because it slipped sideways and missed you and us by about thirty feet.”
A strange wind indeed.
By Sheri McGuinn - please respect copyright. Audio available on my newsletter:
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