Today, if you look out the back window of our house, this is the sight you see. . . snow on the ground and a beautiful stillness.
One year ago today, a tornado touched down on the north side of Kenosha, maybe ten minutes (at the very most) from our house. Every so often, I go back to The Tornado page on my website to see those pictures I took of that extraordinary tornado – the very first tornado I ever saw with my own eyes – just to confirm that it isn’t just something I dreamt one night after eating too much spicy food for dinner. I look at those pictures and am thankful that the funnel did as little damage as it did and that my stupidity in standing outside and snapping photographs of it did not end up costing me dearly. (The funnel cloud was very thin, which led me to miscalculate how far away it was. It turned out to be about a mile away from where I was standing – and had I known it was that close to me, I would have been down in the music building basement, probably lying underneath the grand piano in my studio, swathed in my graduation gown for extra padding, instead of standing at the top of the hillside, snapping pictures like those fools you see on TV chasing tornados.)
Life may be normal here in southeastern Wisconsin, one year after our bizarre tornado, but then comes news of floods and mudslides in Seattle, Washington where my brother Steve and his family live. I’m not sure what it is about the Bergs, but we seem to attract flood waters the way sidewalks attract ice cream cones. Last summer Racine and Decorah were both hit terribly by floods (Decorah even worse than us) – and now Seattle. This probably means that the innocent folk of Madison (where Nathan lives) should get to work building their ark while there’s still time.
At any rate, it seems that Mother Nature is increasingly inclined to wield weather like a club, probably in retaliation for what we have managed to do to this planet of ours. And if nothing else, it serves as a very powerful and even unmistakable reminder that we are not nearly as powerful as we like to imagine ourselves to be. Mother Nature is a whole lot bigger than we are – and not always very motherly. And above all, she is full of surprises – and more and more of them seem to be of the unpleasant variety.