Thunderstorms and Trees
We had a terrible storm here last weekend - lightning, power outages, and downed trees all over the place. It’s unusual for us to have summer storms, so unusual that on the news they were harkening to back to our last summer thunderstorm…in 2019. So we all crossed our fingers and hoped that the weather would put on a good show, but not too good of a show.
And it did! We were in the middle of movie night when the lightning show started and we made it through the night without our power going out, which was ideal and not true for many of our neighbors. My girls were worried about our many pets but at first it didn’t seem like they were phased. They slept on happily.
Until the movie ended. It seemed they thought the thunder was just another part of the soundtrack. But once the TV was off, their ears perked up and they realized it wasn’t just movie night. We spent the evening snuggling them and eventually the storm abated.
But it got me thinking. What storms in my life rumble in the background, blending in until the background noise quiets down? I’ve spent a lot of the last year untangling what was storm and what was soundtrack, and I have to tell you that the cacophony of my daily life drowns out a lot. It’s not until I get a moment to myself that realize how big the storm really is.
A friend asked me last week how we survived with infant twins and I answered flippantly. “Oh, you know, I don’t remember much of it!” But once I sat down with the question in a quiet moment, the reality hit me. There was a lot of soundtrack back then — potty training and sleep schedules and playing at the park. But there also a lot of thunderstorm. Rushing to the hospital alone in early labor while Forrest stayed home with our eldest. Getting norovirus all at once and hoping the grown ups would be well enough to care for the kids, fearing what we would do if we weren’t. Realizing I had been severely anemic since the C-section and I was trying to do everything with hardly enough energy to get out of bed.
I look back now and I understand why we didn’t pay attention to the storm. How could we? There was too much going on. But it’s a decade later and because we didn’t pay attention to the thunder, we also didn’t clean up afterwards. We never really talked about what it was like to be stuck in a house for a year with three kids under three, counting the hours until nap time. Or what it was like for Forrest to have so much pressure to keep his job, our health insurance, our livelihood.
On Sunday morning, I saw a friend on Facebook had posted that two 80-foot firs had come down in her yard the night before. One of them had landed inches away from her house. She was thankful that all that had been damaged was her garden, but sad because the trees and the garden were gone.
That’s how I feel about those years. Boy, we got through by the skin of our teeth and wow, do I feel lucky for that. But I miss those trees that fell - my energy, my optimism, my perhaps naive belief that things will just work out. And I guess now that we’ve got time enough time to start cleaning up, maybe the next thing on the list is to do a little re-planting. Perhaps, in another decade, those trees might just grow tall again.
