Without knowing why, both my husband and I sat bolt upright in bed at exactly the same moment.
Only seconds before we had both been sound asleep, but at that moment we felt panic and some kind of unknown terror.
The curtains were blowing straight into the room at a right angle.
As we flew out of bed down the stairs, I noticed that each step was slick with rain water.
We frantically searched the cabin for flashlights, candles, matches… some source of light.
Except for the wind, everything was eerily silent and we wondered why we were able to see.
The sky was lit up by what seemed like a pulsing strobe light. It was as if lightening was striking over and over again, but there wasn't any thunder calling after it.
Rain seeped in around the seams of the door and down through the stove vent as though wind and water had become one.
When we finally located two candles, lighters and a failing flashlight, we tried to go back to bed despite the unusual storm.
Stiff and wide-eyed awake, we were high in the cabin’s loft worrying about our children sleeping two floors below us in the tiny cabin's basement bedroom.
What if they woke up in the pitch black darkness of the basement and we didn't hear them?
What if a tree fell on the cabin?
Their room felt awfully far away.
Though we closed the window, the rain pounded relentlessly it’s tin roof and thunder began making up for lost time.
I am not usually frightened by storms, but I found myself afraid.
After a particularly loud thunderbolt shook the foundation of the small cabin whose location at the foot of the Appalachian Trail was chosen to provide a long weekend retreat, I threw the covers off.
I ran down the stairs and called over my shoulder to my husband, “I’m going to the basement!”
I crawled into the tiny single bed where my daughter slept and hugged her warm little body in to the curve of mine.
The basement bedroom was a windowless, cinder block cell buried deep in the forest floor.
Thankfully, the sounds of the storm were muffled there and I slept as well as any grown up can when sharing a twin bed with a four year old.
In the morning we woke to the world’s most beautiful day. The sky was bright blue and birds were singing.
The little cabin was whole, but without power and water.
Looking outside we discovered that a giant pine tree fell and crushed the cabin's fence.
Perhaps the sound of the tree smashing the wooden posts was the noise that woke us so suddenly?
We later learned that a tornado had touched down less than a mile from our cabin.
I am haunted most, not by near misses and what might have been, but by the storm's eerie light, pulsing, bright and silent, like white, hot anger.
