MY MEMORIES

Chapter 8

The Storm

Several weeks after the baby was born Mama was sick again. She was lying down when the man who farmed the place where we lived came to our door. He seldom talked to us but came to tell us that he thought there was a bad storm brewing and we might want to take precautions.

Mama was scared of storms and Margaret was too, when she grew old enough to realize the dangers. I was braver. I think I pretended until I convinced myself I really wasn't scared of storms and a lot of the other things they were afraid of. Elliott pride and determination probably.

We had no way to get a weather forecast. The weekly forecast in the Kansas City Star was too general to be much help. The Farmers Almanac contained a good deal of weather lore and the old folks learned to read the clouds, wind direction and how the animals were acting and, with years of experience, they became fairly accurate in weather forecasting. Grandma Elliott could forecast rain by what she called clabber clouds. They were little globs of clouds scattered all over the sky. Soured milk was said to be clabbered when it became quite thick. It could be heated to separate the whey, (watery liquid,) from the solids and this was our "clabbered cheese.". I suppose this was the clabber to which the clouds were compared.

This afternoon it was so hot it was hard to breathe. There was a different feeling in the air and about three o'clock the sky turned yellow like nothing I had ever seen. Mama got up from bed and held the baby. The wind was blowing very hard and just as I saw my daddy come over the hill, less than a mile away, with his team at a dead run, the tornado struck. Then I got scared.

The boards we had put down to make a walk to the "outhouse" were almost buried in the ground but they were sucked up in the air like toothpicks. The mother hens and their almost grown broods were in heavy individual houses. The hen houses and the barrel my kittens lived in flew by our north windows. I said, "Good bye little kittens. I hate to see you go but if my daddy gets home alive I won't cry." Then the house moved on its foundation and it started to hail.

In a little while the door opened and THERE WAS MY DADDY. He had been as frightened about us as we were about him. He was wearing a yellow slicker that was in shreds. Daddy was always very good to his horses but he had beat them with a pick handle to make them head into the storm. I was so happy to see him I couldn't worry about anything else.

Mama sat in the rocking chair through it all rocking the baby and crying quietly. The baby never woke until all the excitement when Daddy got home.

We were really pretty lucky. We salvaged some of the chicken houses and a few of the young broods. Our main flock of chickens and the other animals had gone to the big shed off the barn and were alive. I was relieved to find that Chubby, my dog, was fine. The only damage to the two big barns was the loss of two sliding doors.

Mama, the baby and I got to spend about a week with my Elliott Grandparents while the house was being repaired.