Have you ever driven down a road and thought, gosh this looks familiar and when you can't remember where or why, you just kind of brush it off? I am a guardian for a young lady that lives in Leavenworth. She has been recuperating from an injury in a nursing home in Leavenworth. On my way to one of the several meetings that I had to go to I drove down this road and just couldn't figure out why it looked so familiar. Every time I went I took the same route trying to figure out what it was about that road. I even had my husband drive down it with me to see if maybe it was some road that we drove on when he was in the band but it wasn't familiar to him at all. I finally gave it up as just another one of the running roads from my teenage days growing up in Leavenworth.
Tonight as I laid in bed with the TV off and the room dark it started to lightening and thunder. The wind picked up and the rain came and the next thing I knew I was thinking about all of the tornado's that had been happening in the Midwest these past couple of weeks so I decided to get up and check out the Weather-bug for more information.
As I sat down in front of my computer with the lights still off a big bash of thunder hit and I started thinking about the storms we use to have out at Grandma Edna's. How scary it was when I was little to be way out in the middle of no where with no TV or radio and the only sounds you heard was the wind beating the rain against the house and that was really pretty creepy. They didn't have a yard light so believe me it was dark. When I got really scared my Grandpa use to rock me in the old chair in the kitchen by the wood stove. He wasn't afraid of anything but I sure was.
I'll never forget the summer of 1966 when our area had more tornado's than you could count. Check this out by clicking 1966 Tornado's and you will know what I'm talking about.
One Sunday in June that year the whole family was out at Grandma's. Since it was raining we had to play inside so we spent our time telling spooky stories to the little ones but before the afternoon was over we were the ones that were scared.
In the middle of our stories a storm came up and it came fast. My Uncle Gerald had just made it to the farm after fighting 3 or 4 tornado's on the road out from Leavenworth. It was raining, the wind was blowing, it was dark and then someone decided that we all had better head for the cave. Talk about panic. Wow what a mess. The only way my uncles and Dad could get all of the little ones to the cave safely was by handing them from one man to the other and the wind was blowing so hard that the child looked like a piece of clothing on a cloth line just blowing in the wind. It also didn't help that the cave was dark and as we packed in there it got even darker. By the time the men had all of the children and most of my aunts safely in the cave, it quit. Just like that. No more storm! It quit raining, the wind quit blowing and the sun even came out. But what a mess we had when we came out into the daylight. Trees were down and limbs were everywhere.
Since we were two miles from the main highway and you had to drive one mile through the timber just to get there we didn't know if any of us could even leave. The men checked the road and made any repairs to get across the two creeks you had to travel over and after we ate it was like a caravan leaving on a trip. We all left together and once we made it to the highway the next trick was to find a safe route home. The storms had really did a lot of damage up and down the highway going into Leavenworth so Daddy had to take a couple of different routes. It was on one of those routes that we went down the road that was so familiar to me.
It was a sad day, trees were everywhere, roofs off of houses, cars turned over and people crying. After driving through all of that we began to worry about what we would find at our house. We were lucky and only had some limbs down.
It seems funny that some of that road still looks the same as that terrible day. Like they never took the time to clean up all of the tornado's mess. That storm was in 1966 almost 46 years ago and it never fails to amaze me on how your memory works at really weird times. Maybe I remember it because it was a very traumatic time in my life but I doubt it. I was young and it was just another day at the farm with Grandma and Grandpa. You never new what new adventure would happen.
There is a funny side to this story. During all of the storm, the passing kids in the rain and wind, children crying because they were scared or wet, the aunts trying to calm everyone down and the men working hard to protect all of us. My grandparents never left the house. Nope, Grandpa sat in his rocker and thought that we were all acting pretty stupid and Grandma and my Mom worked on getting supper ready for us to eat when the storm blew over. To them it was just another day. Now how cool is that.
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