A Storm and a Fire

[Pippa]

Last night around six o'clock in the evening I was sitting in my room looking through old pictures. Normally I am not the sort of person to just look through a shoebox filled with old pictures for the sake of reminiscing and in fact that is not what I was doing. I was only looking through the box of photographs to find appropriate pictures to give to my friends as going-away-to-college momentos. However, this task quickly morphed into reminiscing and nostalgic musings on my childhood.

Then, it started to rain. This seemed fitting as I have always loved a good visual and what is better than going through old photographs alone in your childhood bedroom better than going through old photographs alone in your childhood bedroom while it is raining outside. It just seems natural. If I were making a movie of my life and chose to include this scene, (which I probably would if you keep reading you will see why) I would definitely choose rainy weather and not just because of what happens next but because it would just set the tone of melancholic musing very well.

Of course, this rain quickly escalated from a dreary summer shower to a full blown downpour, then to a thunderstorm. Suddenly, the wind was violent and the picturesque rain had frozen into hail the size of golf balls. At this point I stand up to look out the window. I could tell this wasn't your every day storm.

And what should I see out my window but, oh look a funnel cloud. At this point I paused for a moment to admire the beauty of the tornado ravaging through my neighbor's field. The wind was now strong enough to be knocking down trees around the house. Now I saw the huge tree not ten feet from my wind wrestling with the wind. I calmly thought to myself, "That tree is going to fall down." My next thought was the equally calm observation that it could very easily kill me where I stood if it chose to fall toward the house and right into my bedroom.

And then the tree, the largest and oldest on our property and probably about twenty or thirty feet tall, crashed to the ground, miraculously it fell away from the house and equally miraculously it missed the power lines by about an inch.

Now all of this transpired in about thirty seconds, although it had seemed as though time had slowed down. The tornado disappeared as quickly as it had materialized and I left my bedroom and my nostalgic musings to find my family and ask them if they had seen the funnel cloud. As I walked downstairs I could not help contemplating the symbolism of what had just occurred, I am a literature nerd after all.

There I was looking through old photographs, lost in memories of the past, when a violent storm comes from out of nowhere and tears down the oldest and most beloved tree on the farm. Quite a powerful image.

But the fun was just begun. When I made it into the kitchen my sister was frantically calling 911. My brother was running out into the torrential downpour towards the main road, where I now saw flames eating up the trees and fences there. My father, however, was headed in the other direction towards another tower of smoke. I ran to the far window and saw my neighbor's barn engulfed completely in flames.

911 was busy. It took Carlee fifteen minutes to get a hold of an operator. By that time both fires had doubled in size but the wind had slowed. The next two hours were filled with sirens as seven firetrucks arrived on both scenes.

My neighbor's farm breeds and trains thoroughbred racehorses. By a stroke of luck, however, the horses had been moved just last week out of the barn in flames into the one right next to it. When the barn caught on fire it was filled with hay, which fed the fire so that it burned well into the night.

My family and I spent the evening watching the flames burn the barn down to the ground. It was quite a sight to behold.

When we finally returned to our house, we found we had lost power (not surprising given the fact that the fire started by the road was started by fallen powerlines). I then stayed up for hours reading by candle light. It felt quite gothic sitting alone in my family's great room reading by the light of an oil lamp. And by chance it so happened that I was reading the perfect book for the setting - Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, gothic but satirical.


Overall, it was a fun night. Our electric still has not come on but I am able to post this because I am at work and the baby is asleep. Except now she is waking up and so I must go. Quite a long, narrative blog post, not my usual hurried thing but I felt like a change.

[Kitashi]

Wow, quite a situation.