This essay is posting a few days late and you’ll understand why when you read it.  My last essay, When Plans Change, was an unintended precursor to this one.  Last time, I wrote about rolling with the punches when someone else gets punched.  That essay was about compassion and empathy.  This time, I’m going to talk about when you get punched yourself.  It’s an essay about resilience, gratitude, and so many of the topics I keep writing about.  Life sure tries to teach you the same lessons over and over again.  And what’s my mantra?  All together now:  We’re here to GET it right, not to BE right.

Our story begins last Wednesday, almost a week ago, when I was still noodling on what I wanted to write about for this essay.  I still have that more humorous one buzzing around in my head and I WILL get to it, but for some reason it just didn’t feel right.  We were anticipating the residue of Hurricane Ida coming through that afternoon and I was thinking about the impact that 3-5 inches of rain might have.  “Don’t forget to check the sump pump,” I thought, “to make sure it’s not cockeyed and won’t kick on.”  I was thinking about the potential of losing power and maybe not being able to make my biweekly Zoom call with my college friends.  I was thinking about cooking dinner.  I was NOT thinking about a tornado.

The TV was off around 5:00 because I was just reading and Trish had gone upstairs to take a nap.  My BFF, who lives a half hour south and east of us, texted that they were under a tornado warning and were heading downstairs.  Now, tornados are NOT common in this corner of southeastern PA.  We’d had a surprisingly strong one just a few weeks before and some straight-line winds that did damage the week before that.  But tornados are just not a thing here.  I turned on the news and started cooking dinner.  I saw that the “cone of danger” emanating from Beth’s warning was heading in our direction.  I chopped potatoes and put them in the oven to roast.  In minutes, my phone went off with a warning of our own.  I honestly wasn’t worried, but I’m a person who follows directions.  I turned off the oven, went upstairs, woke Trish up, we grabbed the cats and my iPad and headed to the basement—only the second time in the five years I’ve lived here.  Bridget was upset to be separated from her food bowl.  It was raining fairly hard, as expected, but we still had power so I started streaming the news.  Two meteorologists were tag teaming at this point since there were three of four warnings at once.  Very unusual.  Then, they both gasped and pointed to a slowly moving white feature on the radar.  That, they said, was a debris field.  This was now a confirmed tornado.  And guess which warning that was associated with?  Then, for dramatic effect, the power went out.  We looked up at the small basement window.  We could see absolutely nothing.  Just sheets of water and an occasional glimpse of trees swaying like paper caught in a fan.  We were barely breathing.  After a couple of minutes the power flickered back on, to our amazement, and we watched the radar with Adam and Cecily (the meteorologists) until the storm was past us.  Then wandered upstairs.  We didn’t see any daylight above us when we opened the basement door, thank goodness.  The rain had slowed to a drizzle.  Trish went outside as the neighbors all gathered.  I, like the conductor of the band on the Titanic, finished cooking dinner.  I didn’t know what else to do!  We never ate it.

Trish came back in and told me to come outside.  The first thing I noticed was the massive branch from the neighbors’ tree lying in our driveway, right where Trish normally parked.  For some reason, she had been driven to pull her car back to the end of the driveway before the storm, wanting the rain to clean mud out of her spot.  Her car would have been totaled.  Then I looked across the street.  The large, dense tree line behind our neighbors’ houses was gone.  Just gone.  I could see sheared off trunks peeking out a few feet above the roof line, like someone had taken a pair of scissors and snipped them off.  The trunks were just bare.  Ripped of all foliage.  The street was flooded.  Some neighbors lost siding or had other damage from flying debris.  Everyone was just milling about; some were collecting garbage cans flung a couple hundred yards away.  I was stunned but had no idea the extent of the damage.  The rain came back so we headed inside.  I don’t remember turning the TV on.  No one really knew the extent of the damage then, anyway.  I started the call with my college friends and the power went off promptly at 9:00.  Trish and I worked from 9:00 pm until 3:00 am bailing out our sump well to keep the basement from flooding.  Eight inches of rain puts a bit of hydrostatic pressure on a foundation!

Many of you reading this know what happened.  An EF2 tornado with 130 mph winds ripped through our neighborhood.  The tree damage I saw when I first poked my head outside was repeated across a path that stretched several miles.  At some points the tornado bounced down and took out some roofs.  It had a particular appetite for power line poles.  And the trees!  So many big, old trees ripped out of the ground or sheared off and stripped!  Trees across roads.  Trees into houses.  Skeletons of trees standing alone in what used to be solid wooded areas.

After a restless three hours of sleep, we awoke to a beautiful day.  Why is it always a beautiful day after a horrific storm?  Is there just nothing left in the atmosphere or is it a way of giving hope?  The first thing I noticed was the drone of the generators.  I like some white noise, but there was something about those generators that was like nails on a chalkboard to me.  It grated on your nerves like a tooth ache.  That was quickly drowned out by the chainsaws and wood chippers.  The streets were filled with crews, dozens of them.  Our power was only out for two days but it felt like forever.  We were so fortunate.  No damage to the house.  Minimal tree and limb loss.  We spent most of the day helping neighbors and walking around.  Everything looks different.  I have this vision of my guardian angels (Dad, Grandma, Trish’s parents) lifting that funnel cloud up and keeping it above the roof line for us and Trish’s two sisters (we all live in a line that defined the tornado’s path).

The disruption wasn’t so much the power loss or even the road closures.  Trying to get out of the ‘hood was like figuring out the Hogwarts staircases—every time you went somewhere, different roads were shut in different spots as they first cleared the roads, then pulled out enough of the downed trees to assess the utility damage, and then fixed the damage.  These guys are freaking heroes.  All I could think of, though, was that feeling of powerlessness, of being totally at the mercy of Mother Nature.  I also thought about the earth’s power of renewal and how all those stripped wooded areas would lead to new growth, new habitat.  Even the deer are thrilled at all the yummy leaves now within reach!  But us humans, we are fighting entropy to put things back the way we like it, the way we need it, as quickly as possible.  It feels futile and comforting at the same time. 

As I write these words, it is the first day of Rosh Hashanah—a time of introspection and assessment.  Fitting that life has given us this reality check.  It sounds trivial to relate this, but I think about how I felt that first morning.  We had no power; the roads were blocked; I wasn’t clear headed enough to realize that we could still use our gas stove and that we still had water.  I just thought, “I can’t eat breakfast.”  I was panicked for just a minute wondering where my next meal was coming from!  It’s been a long, long time since I’ve found myself on that bottom level of Maslow’s hierarchy, worrying about basic safety and needs.  I’ve been so busy anguishing over those upper levels of the pyramid, with not enough gratitude about not needing to worry about those lower foundational levels; not enough compassion for those who do.  Trish and I are still mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted, sentiments echoed in the eyes of our neighbors.  We know we skirted a disaster and so many others were not so fortunate.  I’m still serenaded by the sounds of wood chippers and the roads are still clogged with repairmen, but I’m feeling normal enough to write.  “Prayers and chainsaws” said the headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer; gratitude and resilience.