Trauma By Weather

Trauma By Weather

I reached the house just in time.

“Hey, Frankie,” I said, closing the door and finger combing my wind blown hair back into place. “Where’s your mom?” I set the case with my laptop on the floor and took off my jacket, throwing it on the sofa before closing the door.

The fourteen-year-old pulled her nose from her homework and rolled her eyes.

“She’s in the den, watching the Weather Channel.”

“But, it only started raining just now.”

“You know how she is,” she replied, and turned her attention back to her journalism textbook.

I gave her a little kiss on the top of her head as I passed by en route to find Alexandria. I snatched a Tootsie-roll from the candy dish, popped it in my mouth and poked my head into the den.

Alexandria sat Indian-style on the floor directly in front of the 50” Hi-Def screen. Mesmerized, she rocked gently to and fro while unconsciously gnawing through her fingernails like a wood-chipper.

The Weather Channel's graphics computers were working overtime. A yellow and green and purple storm front rolled across a map overlay of Northern Virginia, D.C. and Maryland from southwest to northeast; a Nor' Easter, as we called it.

The display was cyclic. It stopped, reset, and restarted again from where it had begun like the video version of a skipping record.

“Hey, baby. Whatcha doin’?” I asked, chewing the words out around the Tootsie-roll.

She jumped, clutched her heart, then sighed in relief.

“Watching the Weather Channel,” she said smiling; happy I was finally home.

“Oh yeah? What’s on?”

“The wea-ther, smarty.”

“Haven’t you seen that one already?”

She shot me a cross look, and then softened as she always does when I tease her. “There’s a huge front headed this way. They’re talking about tornadoes. They’ve posted a tornado watch.”

“Honey, that just means conditions are favorable for tornadoes, not that we’re gonna get one. If we were, they’d post a tornado warning.”

“They say you should take cover in your basement. If you don’t have a basement, you should find a low ditch to lie in. We don’t have a basement.”

“It’s a rancher.”

“We need a basement.”

“How ‘bout I just dig you a ditch?”

Then came the oh-so familiar glare.

“Honey, there’s never been a tornado here. That’s why there are so many trailer parks in the area.”

“There aren’t any trailer parks around here.”

“I know. I’m just trying to make you feel better. But if there were, they’d have nothing to worry about. I can’t ever remember a twister hittin’ here. Well, except maybe for the one that hit down the road. It went through Pasadena a couple years back; tore up a bunch of trees and knocked down some power lines.”

“Did anybody get hurt?”

“And then there was one – a big one – that went though down south; Waldorf, about seven years ago. That was a couple of years before I met you. They're still rebuildin’ that town. They said it was a good thing it wasn’t a weekday or the death toll…”

“Stop it! You’re scaring me!”

I couldn’t remove the grin from my face. Alexandria was so easy when it came to extreme weather. Most women have bug phobias. Not her. She catches crickets by the handful and tosses them out of the house; but weather? She freaks.

So the thunderstorm passed and all was as it should be … for a day or so. That’s how summer is, one storm after another. Alex became a basket case.

“Eeeeek!” was her response to an unexpected clap of thunder. Pale and wide-eyed, she’d look around, but never out the window. That’s where the weather was. I half expected to come home from work one day to find her skin on the floor she jumped out of it so often.

I remember one night I woke up to find her surgically attached to me. Lightning danced across the sky, flashing though the bedroom window like special effects at a hard-rock concert. It was then I realized Alex didn’t know anything about electricity. Had she, she would have known the steel rod in my leg made for a natural lightning rod. If I go, she goes. I decided not to tell her. I liked the way she held on to me when the storms came around at night.

Then came the time I worked late one evening. I was heading home listening to WTOP, a news station out of D.C., when a weather advisory interrupted the broadcast.

Uh-oh. This storm must be a doozey, I thought. I better not tease her about this one.

By the time I made it into my neighborhood, the National Weather Service had posted a tornado warning for Baltimore and the surrounding areas. I drove down the narrow, neighborhood streets beneath a light show in the sky. The wind was fierce. Small trees uprooted in yards, trashcans took flight, lawn furniture and small objects and all manner of debris went airborne. It was absolutely pitch black. I parked the car and ran into the house. I could hear the Weather Channel foretelling meteorological Armageddon from the den. Frankie was at the kitchen table doing her homework.

“Boy, it’s getting bad out there. Where’s your mother?”

She gave me a look that belongs exclusively to teenagers.

“She’s in the back yard… lying in a ditch.”

***