Somebody found the old photo album we thought was lost forever. Damn near a hundred miles away over in Louisville, wedged up against a fence. All the pictures from when I was a kid catching fish at the lake, tubing behind the pontoon, the annual pig roast potluck down by the dock back in ’98. This nice lady Kathy put the pictures on the Facebook group where folks go to look for what’s been lost in the storm: Quad State Tornado Found Items.
Storms keep coming out of nowhere now. Storms so big whole neighborhoods up and disappear. All’s left are naked trees, limbs twisted, trunks snapped in half, their broken bodies like martyrs of the Earth. The sulfurous smell of a thousand lighting strikes. Brimstone in the air, like God done lit a match. Most everything just flies away, but good folks post what they find online. If you’re lucky, you come across a picture of yourself as a child smiling, not a care in the world.
I’m pretty old now with kids of my own, but Kathy, she saw that child’s smile and thought, Here’s somebody’s memories hanging off my backyard fence. So I messaged her and got her address, and now we’re packing what little we have left in my parents’ van. The folks were spared, thank God, storm just missed them. They pick us up and say, Let’s go get our pictures back.
I take one more look before we drive off—you know how you do a double check, ask the family if they’re forgetting something—but then you remember that everything you’ve worked your whole life for is gone. Crushed. Ripped apart. Sucked into a great black vortex of death and flung to God knows where. Your life’s right there under your feet yet cruelly irretrievable, buried in a flattened heap of drywall and insulation, wooden beams, broken furniture, soiled clothes. The house you and your wife bought before you could afford it, not yet married but so eager to start your life together. She’s gone and it’s all gone and now you have to do this again, alone.
You start wondering how you’re going to live when you put so much money into the house to make it perfect for your family, and does insurance cover tornadoes (acts of God, you think they’re called, except, what kind of God would act like this?), and where can you live where God can’t take it all away again? But you just thank God you’re alive, your precious son and daughter are alive. Wipe the grime off each sweet soft face. Kiss their cheeks. Hug them closer now they’re all you got, all you need. Hop in the car. You’ll survive.
We get to Kathy’s house in Louisville, a lovely old colonial still standing. Not a scratch on it. This older woman Kathy’s so happy, crying tears of joy to have found my leather-bound memories. I hug her and start crying too. I cry in the arms of a woman I only just met. So damn thankful to have something left, something to pass on. We stand outside for a while, looking at Kathy’s fence where she found my pictures. A perfect wooden fence, not so much as a crack or board missing, the kind of stability and security I never much noticed before.
To stop myself from thinking about acts of God, about Biblical floods, about how Kathy’s a saint and maybe that’s why God spared her, I check the Facebook group on my phone and somehow there’s a picture of my guitar—my Surf Green Stratocaster from when I had the band. All the parties we played, so many good times. Haven’t picked it up in months, but some guy named Mike posted my guitar on his living room couch. I can’t believe it, so I message him and come to find he lives just across town from us, on the other side of Bremen. I say, Hey kids, we’re going to get Daddy’s guitar, and we get back on the road, heading toward home again, rescuing what’s left of it. Now we’re on a mission, our van a little Noah’s Ark. Seeing my guitar feels like a sign that maybe God hasn’t forsaken us after all.
When we get back to Bremen, Mike’s modest ranch is battered but still standing. This side of town somewhat remains. Trees uprooted and roofs half-missing. Refrigerators in the street, cars overturned and sideways in ditches, like the child God got bored and rearranged His little dollhouse world willy-nilly. Mike says my guitar just came—shoo—flying right through his window, winds from the twister so strong and such. I sit on his couch and hold my beloved Strat, one broken string but otherwise fine, still playable. I strum a few out-of-tune chords. Gotta start jamming again, I think, get the band back together. With all these storms crossing state lines and tearing up homes across the country, you never know how long you got. Sounds like a good chorus hook—“You never know how long you got”—but this is no time to start writing new songs. I shake Mike’s hand and he says, How about a cold one?
Well sure, I say, but do you mind if I check my phone?
That’s when I see what’s surely a sign from God on Facebook—our fat orange tabby cat, Baggy. He’s still alive, wasn’t smushed under that god-awful swirling cloud of rubble. My neighbor Denice is holding all 18 lbs of him, right there a few blocks away from where our house used to be. Praise the Lord, the mission’s real!
So I grab my guitar and kids and thank Mike, and we take off homeward once again, back through the wasteland of Bremen on our mission from God. We find Denise waving, and the kids are so happy, petting and holding our purring little Baggy. The cat’s somehow clean too, not a lick of dirt on him. You have to believe this is some kind of miracle. How the hell could he survive, just some fat little orange cat?
It’s such a miracle that you get to hoping they’ll still find her. Your angelic wife, so kind and always putting the kids before herself, who went to get your daughter’s favorite stuffed bunny she likes to hold when she’s scared. Before your wife could make it back, the windows shattered and the walls started falling in, and right before the roof peeled off like the flimsy tin lid on a can of cat food, you got the kids to the basement and covered their heads and prayed, Dear God let her make it down, let her make it. Oh please God in Heaven let her make it. After it passed, you and the kids scrambled out the storm window in the basement and tried to look, tried to find her, but there was nothing but piles, endless piles. In your heart she’s still there, the laugh that always made you smile. Her perfect kissing lips. Never did leave the house without saying love you babe, love you. One last time please, please God let me hear her say it.
Seeing the kids so happy, I get to hoping maybe our life’s not gone after all, it just flew away and if we look hard enough, we can find it. Please God if I could only look everywhere on Earth. I know she’s there somewhere, so I start walking down our street through the homes razed clean to the foundation and the mounds of broken detritus and the trees stripped so savagely naked that one’s shivering and swaying toward me and then I see it’s her—clothes half-torn off her body, hair a messy nest of curls, the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen. She’s crying and the kids scream, MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! and we all run toward each other through the scraps and shards of our neighborhood. It’s a miracle, thank God, a miracle just to have your wife and kids. Take it all, dear Lord, everything else but a man’s family.
We’re all hugging and crying and never more grateful, and then the love overtakes us like another kind of storm, another act of God sweeping our bodies up into the air—and now we’re flying. We’re holding hands and flying toward another world without storms, without howling black clouds that span the horizon and destroy your home, without ocean waves that swallow towns or raging fires that turn the living earth to ash. A world where everything that was gone is here again and always will be. A place where God takes nothing away from you.
Look around and see that everyone’s here, everything’s all right.
Hug your family and never mind the wind.
Just fly away, just fly away.
They’ll find us all again one day.