Weather
A wind storm blew in early this morning. It is still going a bit, but not in the Big Bad Wolf "blow your house down" sort of way that it was earlier. The Dog kept waking up to bark at the wind.
Windstorms don't scare me anymore but when I was a child they were the worst. I'm sure it had something to do with the "Wizard of Oz". It also owed to the fact that we lived in big, old, creaky houses. I remember one storm, the Columbus Day storm, as it was known. I was maybe 6. The winds were so strong that Dame Judi and Sean collected us from our beds and took us all downstairs into the living room to wait it out. The house was surrounded by trees and our odds were better downstairs, as any falling trees would have to go through our bedrooms first.
There was another storm, years later, that is famous in family lore because Sean wasn't home when it hit. He had removed a door in the living room, over which there was nailed a large piece of plywood. Dame Judi had placed a large hutch in front of the plywood. The wind blew so strong that it blew out the plywood and tried to push over the hutch. Dame Judi happened to be near the hutch at the time and so she pushed back on it, against the wind. She saved us from having it fall on our little heads. The only problem was that the storm was still blowing and so she had to lean against the bloody thing until it stopped. Which it didn't. And because we were all of gradeschool age, none of us were big enough to help her. We couldn't hold the hutch, we couldn't help her move the hutch and trying to reattach the plywood. We just had to huddle on the floor in solidarity, watching her strain against the hutch so it wouldn't fall over, waiting and praying for Sean to get home.
I have a lot of iconic pictures of Dame Judi in my mind. That is certainly one of them. It is one of the reasons why I've told her that I want to inherit that hutch. It is a symbol, in more ways than one, of the creativity and valiance of my mother.
But the blowing doesn't bother me now, here in my little house that is low to the ground and doesn't bear the brunt of the storm. The only thing I really have to do, so long as it lasts, is make sure the front door is locked so it doesn't blow open and allow The Dog to escape.
Oh. That didn't sound good. I think my potting bench just went over.
Windstorms don't scare me anymore but when I was a child they were the worst. I'm sure it had something to do with the "Wizard of Oz". It also owed to the fact that we lived in big, old, creaky houses. I remember one storm, the Columbus Day storm, as it was known. I was maybe 6. The winds were so strong that Dame Judi and Sean collected us from our beds and took us all downstairs into the living room to wait it out. The house was surrounded by trees and our odds were better downstairs, as any falling trees would have to go through our bedrooms first.
There was another storm, years later, that is famous in family lore because Sean wasn't home when it hit. He had removed a door in the living room, over which there was nailed a large piece of plywood. Dame Judi had placed a large hutch in front of the plywood. The wind blew so strong that it blew out the plywood and tried to push over the hutch. Dame Judi happened to be near the hutch at the time and so she pushed back on it, against the wind. She saved us from having it fall on our little heads. The only problem was that the storm was still blowing and so she had to lean against the bloody thing until it stopped. Which it didn't. And because we were all of gradeschool age, none of us were big enough to help her. We couldn't hold the hutch, we couldn't help her move the hutch and trying to reattach the plywood. We just had to huddle on the floor in solidarity, watching her strain against the hutch so it wouldn't fall over, waiting and praying for Sean to get home.
I have a lot of iconic pictures of Dame Judi in my mind. That is certainly one of them. It is one of the reasons why I've told her that I want to inherit that hutch. It is a symbol, in more ways than one, of the creativity and valiance of my mother.
But the blowing doesn't bother me now, here in my little house that is low to the ground and doesn't bear the brunt of the storm. The only thing I really have to do, so long as it lasts, is make sure the front door is locked so it doesn't blow open and allow The Dog to escape.
Oh. That didn't sound good. I think my potting bench just went over.
cobbled together by Moi at 7:00 AM
3 Comments:
Where did you grow up?
Oregon. That's the thing. It's not like I've ever had to deal with tornados or anything. It's also why we did a lot of huddling in living rooms. No one had a storm cellar and I was 15 before we lived in a house that even had a basement.
No, we certainly don't. He'd probably run all the way to Glasgow if he could.
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