It's been a while. Tonight I am thinking about the tornado in Chicago, when I was a kid. The waking in the night, my mother trying to shepherd us down to the basement of my grandparent's home. It was hard to go down the stairs, that's how strong the pressure was from the swirling wind. I remember how I tried to walk down, bending my body as if I was walking in the wind, but it was inside the house my grandfather had designed and built. We walked by the clock which chimed every quarter hour: it had been silent since the day my grandfather had died just a year earlier.
When we got to the basement, the power was already off, off course. With each flash of lightening, we could see, out of the windows, the trees like a loomed cloth in the backyard--weaving a carpet of broken wood. We survived. Many did not. The next morning we drove to try to find my aunt and cousins: they were fine, as if the winds had bounced over their house.
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