The Tornado: 1 Year Later
It was just after midnight, a year ago tonight, that an F3/F4 tornado hit our street here in East Nashville while we were asleep in our beds. I look back at the photos and it still makes me sick to my stomach. My babies were alone in their rooms in the pitch dark when it happened, while my husband and I were desperately trying to get upstairs to them through screaming fire alarms and smoke and broken glass. It’s an absolute miracle that they weren’t hurt.
We lost part of the roof, most of the windows, the chimneys, the neighbor’s roof came off and landed on both our cars, every tree in our backyard skewered our house like javelins, and my husband had to have reconstructive surgery on his broken nose. And then a couple of weeks later the long COVID lockdown began while we were living under tarps, behind boarded up windows.
But we were lucky. Only 3 houses down from us, the tornado’s impact was brutal. This picture was taken just down the block from us. The first time I saw it in person, I doubled over on the street and thought I was going to throw up just looking at it, because if this kind of damage had happened to our house while we were sleeping in our beds, we would not have survived it. Even today, we still walk past houses missing walls and roofs…torn apart like open-sided dollhouses...clothes still on closet rods out in midair...mangled furniture still scattered and molding in the rain.
It’s hard to explain what it feels like to live through a natural disaster, but I guess the best way I can express it is that all the things that have previously seemed safe and solid and sacred in your life suddenly seem weak, delicate, and easily destroyed. I look out the newly replaced windows in my daughters’ rooms when I tuck them into bed each night now, and there’s a beautiful view of the downtown skyline. But I don’t find it comforting, because that view didn’t used to be there. It took a tornado turning hundreds of trees and buildings into matchsticks - shredding a miles-long path of destruction in the dark - in order to create that view. Air is no longer just air…wind is no longer just wind…a storm is no longer just a storm…not once you’ve seen how - at any moment - the empty spaces around you and the people you love can become deadly missiles and arrows.
And it’s hard to comfort my babies, who beg me to tell them that something like that will never happen again, when I know that I can’t make any such promises. But I’ve done my best to shift the narrative for them, so when they get scared, we talk about their big strong house and their big strong bedrooms and their big strong windows that protected them through even the worst storm. “Isn’t that amazing?” I say. “Isn’t your house so safe?!” I try to make them believe that. But convincing myself is a lot harder. Because I know…there but for the grace of God go we.
We’re one year down the road tonight. It’s been a year that started with the impossible and got even more impossible. We’ve got a long way to go, still. But there’s a lot to be thankful for too.
*****
Interested in more behind-the-scenes musings about songwriting, creativity, the Nashville music biz and life in general, along with some free songs? Sign up for my email newsletter here