Easter is early this year; I don’t know whether it was early or late or right in the middle in 1965, but that is the year of the Palm Sunday tornadoes. One went over our heads, but we didn’t know it. I wouldn’t remember the day as special had not we become aware of what had happened to our neighbors.

Because of what I saw later that day, I remember the hours before. It was a gloomy day, warm enough to go out in shirtsleeves; we were looking out the windows like we would on any potentially stormy day. My dad and I were looking to the west from the  – okay, we called it “the west room” then. (Later, my father would rechristen it “the cold room” – not to be confused with “the little cold room”.) Mother was looking out the back door of the porch. The old school house was a across a block of field converted to lawn (yard) and beyond that, the tree line. She came and said there were black clouds up high moving very fast.

She and Grandma went to the basement, down the old stairs that had more the angle of a ladder. Daddy and I just kind of stood upstairs, thinking if we should go down or not. Nothing happened. Mother and Grandma came up; Daddy went back to reading the paper and I guess I wandered around, probably thinking of homework I would always put off until it was almost too late.

Someone knocked at the front door and wanted to know if our phone worked. I don’t remember if it did or not, but I know something was said about the Bassett house, which was about the same distance to the northeast of the schoolhouse as we were to the south, being moved off its foundation. That was the least of it. Teddy Gage was sitting outside in a lawn chair beside the towering roots of a once really towering tree. Metal was wrapped around stripped trees. Homes were picked up and dropped in the lake.

Everything was fine right around our house. The tornado had hopped.