Tornadoes

It feels like my family has always been trying to get away from each other. We deny each other's existence pretending we can wipe clean the blood that binds us together. But each other is only manifestation from a river, a gathering of trees that grow on the banks. We each stand as markers along the way of our history. Time is making us better, but without a bird's eye view, it doesn't seem fast enough. A mother rejects children, a father walks away, a cousin rejects another, an aunt rejects nieces and nephews, a granddaughter rejects a grandmother, a brother rejects a sister, I reject my mother. We are to each other mirrors of imagined calamity, behind which we are all still children reaching for love.

In 1967, a tornado measuring EF-4 on the Fujita scale touched down in the town of Belvidere, Illinois, and blew everything in its path into little bits. My father, who worked at the roller rink as an organist, had to find work in another town. I don't remember if it was Sandwich or Plano or Aurora. It was just another town where my mother and her friends decided to go skating and my mother was impressed, as I always was, by the young man behind the Hammond. 

A year later, my mother and my father married. In 1968, they got a little white poodle named Gidget and called her their test child. Deeming her a success, they had me and bought a little house on Douglas Street. 5 years later, my brother came along. But by 1977, no vow could hold them together. After that, there was no more Atherton family in the house on Douglas Street, and later, a depressed man turned on the gas and lit a match, blowing the house itself off the foundation. I was convinced he was haunted by the ghosts of us still inhabiting that space.

I'm a fan of allegory. I like the idea that I came to be because of a tornado, and that my spirit is strong enough to haunt a person into madness. It portends that I am also a force to be reckoned with. And how I wish that was true. I tell myself that I am there in the potential of me, fully formed, fierce, bones like mountains and hands like thunder clap bolts of lightning. That powerful. In real life, I am "Midwest nice" as my beloved friend Gracie likes to say, a little shy around strangers, quiet until I trust there is a space for me. I watched a film once in which through the breaking of a person, a tree was born and grew through the tearing of flesh. I want that kind of alchemy, that rips apart everything about me that asks for permission and transforms me into a tree with strong woody branches that reach for the sun and roots that can break through soil compositions and stone to get deeper into the mother I never can--a tree that stretches as hard as it can in both directions without a hint of apology. 

Last week, I found myself in the town that bore me, listening to another person in addiction recovery talk about getting well. I listened to her talk about how she recognized she was still blaming other people for her sickness, and how she had to constantly remind herself to take responsibility for the power she had to stay and suffer or to leave and take a chance on herself. I couldn't stop weeping. I thought about all the energy I have given to a patch of grass and an idea of family over the years. I had a long standing dream that we were the people who lived there, not the ones who exited in a rusty Mustang and a moving truck. My dream anchored me into a fantasy while reality had its way with me. I should have known to leave a long time ago, but instead, I let the past own me, and I held my suffering like a security blanket of identity. I've been trying to unwind myself from the sickness of it for years, but it's complicated. Sometimes I find myself pulling one chord loose, only to choke myself with another. It's only the past couple years I have been armed with scissors, and there's a lot of cutting to do.

I have grown weary of false narratives, of victim stories that grow into volunteer service. I found my rage in that recovery meeting and drove myself to Douglas Street, where the house that stands now is not the house I lived in. Someone sat by a lamp at the window reading a book. She looked peaceful in that window that shielded her from the afternoon rain. I remembered living there as a child, trying to swing off the willow tree branches like Tarzan in the back yard, galloping with my Wonder Horse through imagined distant lands, setting my carpet on fire with my toy oven. I remembered my mom and dad bringing my little brother home from the hospital, my grandparents visiting from Arkansas, Sha reading me the same bedtime story book over and over. Then there was the fighting and the divorce, and the selling of our things in the front yard. There was the man who blew himself up in that house he bought from us. There was the feeling that our ghosts drove him to it, and that our sad energy never left. I drew back the power I left there like so many children into a school bus. I gathered myself back all over that land and that town, pulling myself out of the blast hole. I called myself back from helping my father build that concrete retaining wall, jumping mud puddles like Evil Knievel with my neighborhood friends, hanging around the grade school where I stole crayons and discovered a yearning for girls, walking past the marble wall of the bank that burned to touch in the summer sun, racing the sidewalks around Grandma and Grandpa's house on my bike, circling faster and faster. 

I was almost out of town when tornado sirens started to blare. The recorded voice on my car radio urged all to take shelter and I saw that the sky had turned green. I stopped at a gas station and considered my fate as I pumped 11 gallons of unleaded into the rental car tank. Was this the tornado that was going to take me back to whatever I came from? Was I even afraid of that? I got back in the car and began the drive to my aunt's house--the place where I always found love. The tornado swirled around Rockford for a bit, blowing off a roof or two, and then went back into the clouds. I felt acknowledged, like an old friend leaving home for the last time. And honestly, that was all I ever wanted from any of the people.