“Long as I remember,
The rain been comin’ down.”— ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain’ song lyrics by John Fogerty.
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The idea was to thread some thoughts together for this week’s column early last Sunday morning. Sunrise through the breakfast room window was cloudy. A welcome improvement from Saturday’s most-of-the-day deluge.
Dashing out the door for church a couple hours later, it was apparent things had changed. Dark skies were serving monsoon-sized showers blended with notes of hail.
“Looks like I’ll be late this morning,” I murmured. Dashing back inside to escape the weather.
Honestly, waiting for a reprieve in the weather just seemed like another chapter in the recent week’s string of plagues.
“No electricity one week, no gas the next,” said someone at the coffee confab one day last week. “Then an arctic freeze followed by early Spring weather and floods. What next!”
I broke the silence. “Locust.”
Blank stares.
“I reckon the only plague left is a hoard of locust.”
More blank stares.
“You know,” I struggled. “In the Bible. Never mind. I’ll simply settle for no tornadoes.”
I don’t like tornadoes. Not that anyone does. But I don’t even like “conditions favorable for tornados,” as the weather prophets often foretell.
Maybe it’s related to my childhood. I remember standing behind my father in a doorway of darkness framed by bursts of near-constant lightning flashes, popping power lines, and piercing sideways torrents of rain.
He and I braved the elements together at the top of the concrete steps, leaving the safety of the dank storm cellar below. Watching as the black funnel danced across the other side of the small West Texas town of Seymour. But ready to retreat if needed.
Just blocks away, utility poles were snapping like matchsticks. Debris bigger than refrigerators was swirling in the air. The twister was threatening a steel suspension bridge across the Salt Fork of the Brazos River.
Memories of watching the twister gyrate through the night, leaving what daylight would reveal as a path of destruction, have endured since the mid-1950s. I remember wanting my father to make it stop.
In my third-grade mind, my father was invincible. With him one step ahead of me, I was fearless. However, the image of the weather’s wild side illuminated by the storm that spawned it plays vividly in my mind every time one of nature’s most violent forms of wrath comes to life.
That was not the only night my parents spent racing through the rain and darkness. Kids in tow. Seeking shelter in the storm cellar.
The underground shelters were a way of life in West Texas.
They were also excellent places for storing canned vegetables or garden-fresh onions and potatoes in the summer. And cool places for kids to play. Literally.
Playing changed to praying during nights spent waiting out the weather. Trying to sleep on an army surplus cot. In an underground space the size of a closet. Illuminated by a kerosene lantern.
Scary at any age.
Storm-watching was not limited to my childhood. I observed a tornado that rumbled across the west side of Oklahoma City some 30 or more years ago. The good news is I was on the east side of the city. Ready at the drop of a tornado-tossed hat to hastily retreat, if needed.
News of twisters close to home always gets my attention. And you can define close as 100 miles. Give or take the power of the storm.
Without a West Texas-style storm cellar, I have no place to hide. But in my forty-plus years living in Center, the only tornado I recall blew through sometime in the mid-1980s. I didn’t see that one, but the weather bureau reported it as a tornado.
What I did witness was its fury.
Lacking was today’s on-the-spot reporting that “a tornado has been sighted in Podunk County, 2.375 miles away southeast of Toadhop, traveling north-northeast at 25.782 miles per hour, expected to be at the intersection of 78 and 281 in 14.34 minutes.” It was still obvious that something terrible was looming when the skies were dark at midday.
“You have a phone call,” Lois Cooper summoned me.
“We’re scared,” housekeeper and babysitter Mae said. “The plaster is coming off the wall in Robin’s room. When I got there, insulation and wall studs were punching through sheetrock. Braving wind and rain to investigate outside, I saw it. Tallest pine tree in my yard. One to have caused even mythical lumberjack Paul Bunyon to run and hide. Trunk measuring more than five feet in diameter, and the top fading into the clouds. It was working its way out of the ground with the wind whipping it against the house.
“Go,” I commanded, grabbing Mae and the children as I ran out the door.
The alleged tornado took out seven trees, damaged my house, and cleaned off my patio. Took metal tables and chairs, plus a plethora of potted plants, and deposited pieces down the street.
Other damage reports included the Rio Theatre sign, the elementary school roof two blocks away, and several houses.
“So, what was thing about those locusts,” my friend interrupted. Jerking me out of my recollections of storms past. Back to 2024.
“Oh, you know,” I said. The Biblical account of the plagues in the book of Exodus. Disasters inflicted on Egypt by God to convince the Pharaoh of his wrongdoings. The wind brought the locusts; they invaded Egypt … in great numbers. And they followed the hail and lightning storms. Worst in Egypt’s history.”
Blank stares.
“Never mind,” I said.
“Did I ever tell y’all that I still don’t like tornadoes? Especially since I don’t have my father to stand behind.
“I always thought he could make the rain and storms stop.”
—Leon Aldridge
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Aldridge columns are published in these newspapers and magazines: The Center Light and Champion, the Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche, The Fort Stockton Pioneer, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.
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