May 15, 1986 - 20 years ago
Originally published at The Poetic Exodus. Please leave any comments there.
It was a Thursday evening. My dad was still at work and my mom (pregnant with my brother Martin) and I were at home. She was fixing chicken nuggets for dinner. We heard a noise that sounded like it was coming from the microwave for some reason. Mom asked me to go outside on the back porch and see if I could hear anything. There was a big loudspeaker right in our back yard and they were saying something about Wal-Mart. I ran back inside and told my mom.
That loudspeaker was an emergency warning system, and what “they” were saying was that a tornado was approaching Wal-Mart. We only lived about a half mile from there. The sky was getting green and it was very eerie looking outside.
Mom made me go downstairs while she (and I’ll never understand this) finished cooking the nuggets. I don’t remember if we got ahold of Dad or not but I remember something about him having to shut down the computers at the bank or something. He was a data processing manager. I think he got in the vault for safety. I remember Mom trying to talk my grandmother into going over to her sister’s house who had a basement, but she didn’t.
Mom and I sat in a recliner in the basement and listened to the sirens and the voices coming from the speaker outside. We prayed and prayed. I remember thinking about the baby (Martin) inside my mom and praying that we’d all be okay.
When the winds stopped, we went outside. Our home wasn’t damaged - just some limbs and things down. When Dad came home, we went across town to check on my grandmother. All the phones were out, so we couldn’t call her. My grandfather was an hour or so south of town on business, supposed to be on his way home, and we hadn’t heard from him. I remember the streets were almost chaotic. It seems like we had to get permission from the cops or the National Guard or something to get down to where my grandmother was.
When we got to her house, she was almost catatonic. She had stayed at her house, alone, and the tornado had come across the field by the house, directly toward it. She had watched it. My swingset was in the neighbor’s yard. The shed out back was torn up. The church next door where I used to play was heavily damaged.
The next day there was no school. I remember going over to my Aunt Brenda’s house, and making sandwiches and pulling them around neighborhoods in a little wagon with my cousin to feed the people who were trying to make sense of the devastation. Her house was literally one street over from the neighborhoods that sustained the most damage. I remember seeing boards stuck through tree trunks. One house was completely demolished except for a shower stall. Thankfully, only one person died that night. Several more died in flooding in Cape Girardeau that resulted from the same storm system.
I was only seven at the time, so my memories are a bit fuzzy… But that’s what I remember of May 15, 1986.
(Here’s our local newspaper’s account from today’s edition.)