TERRE HAUTE —
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week. After her appointment and my aisle-wandering were done, we topped off our gas tank, ate a nice lunch and headed for home. Along the way, we got a chance to see firsthand the damage just a few minutes of wind can do.
As we drove through the north end of town, we gawked at the aftermath of the storm that hit our area several weeks ago. Open-mouthed, we took in blocks of splintered trees and tarped roofs, fractured gutters and busted windows, and realized just how lucky we had been in losing only our pretty little Bradford pear tree and the top of one of our Georgia red pines to the storm. I was able to clean up our messes in a few hours of bending and sweating, and sawing and dragging, but much of what we saw that day in town won’t be cleaned up for months to come.
The devastating images we’ve seen out of Tuscaloosa and Joplin on the evening news made nervous wrecks out of a lot of folks before the thunderstorm ever came our way in the reds and yellows of a radar screen. I’ve caught myself peering out windows more often this spring, glancing skyward and standing in the kitchen to wait for the weather report to show up on the television.
I’ve replaced the batteries in our weather alert radio, too, just in case we lose power. I was brought up having a healthy respect for storms; it didn’t take much thunder or wind to convince my mom that we all should head to the basement, and in my memory’s eye, I can still see the rain battering against the long, narrow windows that lined the damp, dark cellar of my childhood house as we huddled together near its creaky stairway. I remember the crack of the lightning that felled a huge red oak that stood near my grandparents’ drive, and can still feel the house shudder under the weight of it crashing to the ground.
Scientists tell us that storms are going to be more frequent in the years to come, more violent, too. I want to believe they are wrong, but suspect they aren’t. I want to think that since there are more people now than ever before — housing developments seem to pop out of the ground like mushrooms to hold all that humanity — storms no one noticed decades ago now pack more costly wallops. The odds that people and bad weather can avoid one another have now grown against us. I hope against hope that one reason we hear about more storms is because we have the technology to see them and track them and report them better. But looking at the Hiroshima-like settings that used to be vibrant parts of towns in Alabama and Missouri, I can’t help but believe that we are having more storms, and that they are growing worse. I fear that the next time, we could lose more than just our electrical current and a few limbs.
We moved to our home nearly 30 years ago. Joanie was just a few days shy of having the baby who would turn out to be our daughter, Ellen, and we needed more room. A friendly couple named Freeman and Wilma Chaney offered to sell us their place on contract, since just about everyone around knew we wanted a house, but couldn’t afford the 16-percent interest rates the banks were “offering” in those days. I knew absolutely nothing about buying a house, and after waltzing through the place in just a few minutes, not even stopping to look at the furnace or the plumbing or the condition of the roof, we agreed to buy it. I used my father-in-law’s grain truck to help move the Chaneys out and us in, and we haven’t budged since.
Over the years, we have done the usual remodeling that accompanies stability and a few raises in pay. Nearly 10 years ago, we added a family room and a new bathroom and a deck. The house has been re-roofed twice, has been re-carpeted, and we have a relatively new kitchen. I propped our old barn up and have given it numerous coats of paint; we built a storage barn, and a cabin, and I have hacked and sawed away brush for years to carve out an expansive rolling yard that runs head-long into the 15 acres of woods we now share with frogs and raccoons and deer. Our home isn’t perfect; it awaits more replacement windows, and we hope to remodel two bedrooms soon. A number of the pine trees that I planted within just a year or two of moving here have died, as have those of my neighbors, and I now have to cut them down with the memories of walking five-gallon buckets of water out to them still in my head.
We love the woods here; we love our hummingbirds and our trees and our clean air and our ever-present breeze. We don’t live in a palace, but we don’t owe much on it, either. It has become our home, our refuge, a place that aggravates us at its worst, but comforts us at its best. It is the place where we have chosen to stay.
Our homes are more than shingles and concrete blocks and 2-by-4s; they are more than a mortgage at the bank and a place in which we store furniture and hang clothes. We need to appreciate what we have more often, to be thankful for it, and to help others who have lost what we often take for granted.
After she was swept away in a Kansas tornado, Dorothy Gale finally discovered that “there’s no place like home.” After awakening from her dreams of Oz, she says, “…if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with!”
And to think, it took a storm to make her realize that…
Mike Lunsford can be reached by email at hickory913@aol.com or by writing to him c/o The Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808.
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Tribune-Star columnist Mike Lunsford
Discussion
MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Raising a flag for my father, veteran or not
My daughter, Ellen, and I stood at my parents’ graves on Mother’s Day a few weeks back and talked about how it couldn’t possibly have been so long since we lost them. My dad, for instance, has been gone for 16 years, and that is nearly unimaginable
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Time to become one of the boys of summer again …
Besides writing for a living, I teach school, and I’m not ashamed to tell people that I still love my classroom. I’ve been a teacher for 33 years, all of them in the same school district, and virtually all of them in the same building. But I also have to tell you that if the next few weeks don’t slide by pretty quickly, I may just let loose of the last thread of sanity from which I have been dangling for a while now. There are a lot of teachers out there who feel the same way.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time for us to get the real lowdown on dirt…
I have had my hands in the soil as of late. Two Fridays ago, I planted a viburnum bush, three chrysanthemums and a yellow poplar, not because it happened to be Earth Day, but because it was sunny and warm, and I had the whole afternoon to myself. The dirt I scraped out of and back into the shallow holes I dug near a backyard picket fence smelled good, and when dampened with a few sprinkles of water, it soon found its way into the deep wrinkles of my knuckles and under my fingernails. For the most part, I have nothing but good things to say about dirt.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Make big money: Raise worms at home for fun and profit…
When I think about all of the crazy things my brother and sister and I did just to make a few dollars when we were kids, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for teens this summer as they try to find jobs in what is supposed to be a very tight market. Money, to say the least, was a rare commodity when we were growing up, but you have to at least give us credit for trying.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…’
Had white lace curtains been hanging in the west window of my cabin, I would have had a perfect Wyeth painting to watch last Thursday. A gentle breeze was wafting through my screens, and the sunlight of a warm late March day was fractured by the window sill as it poured onto my legs and feet. I could catch the scent of lilacs as it was carried in by that wind, and it and the subtle melody of the chimes that hang just outside made me as lazy as an old cat.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A report from the country as a new season brings sense of renewal
Regardless of what the calendar may yet say, spring has happened. It couldn’t have come too soon, and it wasn’t just last week and its windy 70s that have convinced me. I have been keeping a journal of sorts in my head for a fortnight now, stashing away reports of birds and buds and sounds in the crammed cabinets of my mind, all in a file marked, “The New Season.”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Feeding time at the homestead draws a host of new guests
I stepped outside into the warmth of an unusually mild early March morning last week to do what I always do just before I grab my briefcase and book bag and lunch bag and head off to work. It’s nearly always dark when I leave, even as the sun gets up earlier and earlier in the late winter, so I often go about the business of feeding our cats with porch lights on and a flashlight in hand.
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If you can still recall reading the poetry of Robert Frost in your high school English class years ago, I imagine that you can conjure up a line or two from his “The Road Not Taken.”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
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SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
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THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
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Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
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The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
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The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
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Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
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The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
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THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
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