It was our first year in Alabama.
Well, my second year, Norah's first as a sixth grader at Homewood Middle
School.
The warnings came fast and furious from a man they call James Spann - a
godlike weatherman around here who rolls up his sleeves the worse things
get and wears trademark suspenders. (I later read he didn't believe in
climate change but has possibly since changed his mind?)
We were living in an apartment overrun with cockroaches. It was a horror
show. The bug man used to knock on the door and yell, "Bug man, Bug man!"
I'd practically yank him inside and cry, "Do something!"
I still can't believe we lived there, but we only stayed a year and then
escaped to the little home were we live now.
"Now ma'am," the bug man would say. "They don't want to be in here anymore
than you want them, and I know ladies are sensitive but your baseboards
could be cleaner is all I'm saying."
He wore a kind space-age Jetson's backpack of bug killer and sprayed
randomly about the apartment and told stories of his momma, his sister, his
daughter, his wife, his ex-wife, and the ladies at the Baptist Church who
had recently taught him to crochet - and did I want one of his crocheted
purses?
One time he said, "You know what the saddest thing is? An ugly girl. Or a
girl who thinks she's ugly. Hell, I'm ugly, and it don't matter, but it
matters for a girl. And I hate to say it but it's a fact. Ain't nothing
sadder than an ugly girl."
He would spin tales and I couldn't quit listening.
As the tornado spun toward Birmingham from Tuscaloosa that day, James Spann
yelled at us all to get into our safe spaces. I put Norah and Olive in the
bathtub with blankets and a helmet.
And then it was over - just like that - the sky no longer an eerie yellow
with slashes of green and purple.
We were lucky.
Some of my students were not so lucky. One's uncle lost his legs when a
garage collapsed.
Another's trailer up in Walker County "cracked in two like an egg" she
wrote in her essay about the storm.
Of course, there was also snow-pocalypse, when Birmingham shut down in an
ice-storm, but that's another story.
A storm for another day.
The Storm of April 27, 2011