Tornado Warning
Remembering Ann
You can’t predict a precise moment when tree branches shake and bend, dark clouds scoot and unleash thunder that rumbles like a freight train. You say tornados don’t touch down here. It hasn’t happened in your memory. You can’t predict the violence of trees. You love them for their lofty minds and deep-rooted conversations. You can’t imagine the betrayal, the moment wind and rain soften a big tree’s attachment to the earth and it drops onto your friend’s red sports coupe, with her inside. You didn’t predict that moment – this vibrant, beautiful woman, killed on impact by a let-loose tree. It wasn’t a tornado, just a gust of wind. What some people call an Act of God. The god of bad excuses. You’d put off lunch because of busy-ness, not predicting crushing coincidence. Your husbands on the same train Your car behind hers waiting to turn What if she’d left home a minute later? What if you’d left home a minute earlier? Time is fungible. Nothing is inevitable. In another dimension she may be living your life. In another dimension she still jogs with a little sideways kick.
I thought of Ann this past weekend when I was in Opal Creek wilderness and the wind was bringing down some of the trees. This poem is heartbreakingly beautiful. Such a tragic loss.
I really loved this poem Susan, such a true expression about tornadoes, trees, and the loss of a dear friend. And the picture, whew. I watched a tornado fly over my grandmother’s house (in Okoboji, IA., we were under the dining room table) and we weren’t hurt. My younger sister helped evacuate many people at the top of a restaurant and sent them to the basement. The roof was taken off! It was 1967.