My mother always told me that when I was a child she could gauge the weather by looking at me. In dry weather, I was nearly straight-haired, only the slightest wave. As the humidity rose, my hair waved and curled. By the time the storm hit, it was tight against my head.
If I was an accurate meteorologist, I was also an oblivious one. The first storm I remember caught me by surprise. We were still in North Carolina, living in a small, wood-frame house with sash windows. My mother and I were alone when the wind and rain came on suddenly. The translucent curtains billowed in, and she ran from room to room shutting windows. I was determined to help. Jumping and grabbing, I got a good grip on a window bottom and pulled hard, hard enough to make it come crashing down and pin my open hands to the sill. For a long moment my mother did not hear my screams. Then she was there, lifting the windows and freeing me. She rubbed my hands, massaging my knuckles with the sharp-scented yellow liniment that she used to cure all pains.
Rain pressed the glass beside us; the room was dim and shadowless between flashes of light. Still, I could hear my mother’s voice under the thunder and drumming rain, “It’s all right, it’s all right. Nothing’s broken.” She held my hands open and pressed my red palms. The house shook but held the safety of my mother’s large hands, her steady blue-gray eyes, and the familiar medicinal smell.
When I was a very young woman, I took my mother’s story about my hair as a proud illustration of my sensitivity. Now, though, I think that she was telling me how easily and by what means I could be shaped and called into response.
We are accustomed to the idea that who we are individually is a result of a variety of influences: the idiosyncrasies of our parents, our social and economic conditions, our genetics, our cultures. We take the land into account only when reckoning mass character, rarely the individual. Psychiatrists do not lean forward in their chairs and ask, “And what of the land you came from? Did the earth shake you awake at night or did it lie out flat and placid? Did its dry air go killing cold in winter, or did its constant warmth pull sweat and oil out of you? Did its waters rise? Did animals ever come to your door? How thick were the trees?”
I am not suggesting these elements of place—land, air, water, and living things—as metaphors or tools to illuminate our personal lives, but as active and ongoing elements of who we are. Nor am I talking here of the apparent fixity of land and place as it can be seen through the lens of a camera or a window pane, but the full scope and natural acts of a place, the characteristics we cite when we talk of loving or being at home in a place. And like any other affection, love of a place is born of interaction, requires conversation and listening, and, in the end, is a joint narrative of the individual self and the object of love. Place may be of more or less importance to some, but it is never negligible. I’ve no doubt I would have been a different person had my parents reared me on that red Piedmont clay under quieter skies.
In 1959, a couple of months before my fourth birthday, my mother and father brought us—me, my older brother and sister—to live in Plant City, Florida. The story then was that we were moving here for my father’s health. His old job in a North Carolina chemical factory had turned his skin a bright, lemony yellow; the doctors said he would die if he stayed. This, my mother—the storyteller of the family—always posited as our sole reason for moving here, but often added that the chance to get away from her own nosey and quarreling relatives made the move much more appealing. Our only relative outside of North Carolina was her sister, Lavonne, in Florida.
So we squeezed into Lavonne’s tiny house with her husband and their three kids. Across the street was a bean field and above it acres of sky. Back of the house were my uncle’s hound dogs whose pups exhaled sweet earthiness. Beyond the dog’s house, rows of tangerine trees stretched as far as I could walk, limbs bent low with the weight of their sweet, ripe fruit.
When thunder rattled the baseboards of the little house, Lavonne would run shrieking through the narrow hall. My cousins followed, out of terror or delight, I could not tell. But I wasn’t afraid. I was in the place where, for me, memory would begin its dense, continuous weave.
After only a few months we left my aunt’s and moved into one of the new housing projects. The little duplex was immaculate, its pale gray tiles waxed to such a high gloss that in a storm, the lightning’s reflection shot across the floor and the brilliance seemed to come from below as well as above.
My sister who was eight years older would give me and the other kids she took care of something rubber to hold on to. We all knew that electricity couldn’t hurt or penetrate rubber. Cowering together, we lined up on the couch clutching our rubber toys while the afternoon’s storm passed its swift rage overhead. Distracted by our own company and my sister’s ritual of passing out the toys, we squealed with gleeful terror every time the sky flashed and the thunder broke. My sister never bothered to explain just what we were supposed to do if hit by lightning. Hold our toys up like crucifixes to the evil brilliance? It didn’t seem likely to me even then.
We were still in the housing project late the following summer when we heard that Hurricane Donna was coming. Like all hurricanes, she came on slowly. There was time for preparation: windows were taped, everyone shopped for supplies, and children were sent home from school. My mother stayed home from her factory job and my father did not drive his delivery truck. Even my teenage brother and sister stuck close to home waiting for Donna to come. It was like Christmas. I thought of her as some large, bosomy version of the Virgin Mary, tangible and earthy, but also vaguely threatening.
The night Donna came through, my parents pulled the mattresses off our beds and dragged them into the living room. We would be camping indoors, the five of us sleeping side by side, they announced. I was amazed; they’d never let us children into their bed and never shown any interest in camping. Hurricane Donna had transformed them. Our only illumination was my father’s flashlight and a handful of white odorless candles which threw our shadows high along the walls behind us. All evening, my sister’s tiny transistor radio buzzed with small static-filled voices. My mother and father listened, repeatedly going to the window and then returning to listen again. But there was little to see, only the black sky and the driven rain which came at us horizontally, as if our house had been tipped up on its side. Nothing I saw justified my parents’ anxiety. Eventually, I fell asleep.
I slept a young child’s deep, safe sleep. Donna blew in at 175 miles per hour, at the time, the second most powerful hurricane on record. She left a dozen people dead and another thousand injured. Property damage was well over a hundred million dollars. I did not know this then; death and large numbers were beyond my comprehension.
The next morning the long low field in the center of our block of houses was a massive swimming pool. An older boy down the street got out his rod and reel and practiced casting in the shin-deep water. By noon, most of the children were in swimsuits.
Though we were new to Florida and should have been among the least prepared for a hurricane, my parents had filled the sinks and the bathtub. We were one of the few families with plenty of drinking water. We also had a kerosene heater that could cook food. For days neighbors knocked on our door, coming to cook their dinners or ask for a pot of water. My trust in my parents was altered. While they had obviously overreacted to the storm, mistaking a festive inconvenience for a mortal danger, they had also proved themselves more capable than most at providing the essentials.
For the first time, I suspected that there might be more to them than what I saw each day. Until that point, they had been like the air, a large and constant given, beyond understanding and completely taken for granted.
After Donna, I came to recognize the flat white spiral on the TV meteorologists’ maps. When a hurricane began forming off the coast, I always felt a guilty, pleasant anticipation. Sitting with my parents watching the evening weather report, I would be infused with hope for something that I knew caused them only fear.
Sometimes I tested the limits of pleasure and fear. I was lucky enough to be outside alone in a tree once when the wind came. This was my favorite tree, a high wide live oak. I had climbed up as far as I could, scooting along until the limb beneath me narrowed, bending under my slight weight and I could lean outside the tree’s tent of leaves. Nothing between me and the air. The tree swayed one way and then another in the gusts. I had on my favorite full-skirted, navy blue dress and I was up against the dark, fast sky. I rode that thin bucking limb high above the ground. No one called me in from the storm; I had been overlooked. There was nothing else for a child to want.
Eventually, though, the lightning came close. Caution and cold rain got the better of me. I darted across the field of weeds to my backdoor, puzzled by my shame and lack of courage.
Late in childhood, about the time I realized that other children shared my secret desire for hurricanes, I saw what a storm could do. We heard on the news, my mother and I, that a tornado had touched down near Lakeland. The next day my aunt called to say she knew one of the families hit by it. She wanted to know if my mother would come with her to visit them.
The people were chicken farmers, and I cannot recall their faces at all. What I do remember is their refrigerator wrapped high around the trunk of a splintered tree in surreal and obscene embrace. Nearly featherless, chickens staggered in the fields around the farmers’ broken home. White down littered the ground, and dead chickens lay wrenched about in unnatural postures; what feathers they had left tilted in the wind.
My cousin, Skip, and I concentrated on identifying the objects flung out into the yard. We tried to decide what the scattered pieces might have come from: shards of plastic, bits of cloth and glass, a flattened metal cap, and a long twist of lace and fluffy insulation. But there was no way for us to make the pieces fit into any whole. It was all too large to look at for long, as individual and pointed as the funnel cloud that caused it. I felt myself a voyeur and was happy when my mother called me to the car.
On the drive back to my aunt’s house, I watched my youngest cousin, no more than a baby then, lie full length on the front seat between my mother and my aunt. The rest of us kids filled the backseat. I leaned forward and peered over at her. She stared up, unfocused, and very slowly, in long steady blinks, closed her eyes and slept. The car cut the air around us into wind and hurled our bodies down the highway. I counted two things I’d seen that day that I’d never seen before: the path of a tornado and what sleep looks like at the precise moment it takes someone.
Soon after this, the small nightmare of puberty overcame most of my thinking. Each evening, long after my much heavier sister had left the table, I sat, gleaning the last scraps from the serving bowls. My new appetite made sense; at the age of twelve, I was five feet, eight inches tall. But at night in the bed, while my belly was still full, I flopped gracelessly in the summer heat as if hungry. It was like waiting for a storm without ever having heard the sound of thunder.
By the time I had a name for this new appetite, I’d become a young woman and we were in a mortgaged house, several moves away from the housing project. This was in the early seventies; Nixon and Vietnam filled the airwaves. I no longer went to church with my mother; there seemed no place for faith.
When it stormed, my mother wouldn’t let me use the shower or the telephone; electricity was attracted to wires and water, she’d warn. Our new house had an open carport, and if I leaned on the trunk of the car, I had a good view of the sky. So that became the place where I would go to watch storms. I’d stand as close to the edge of the carport as I could without being drenched by rain.
Then one time it was there, a strike in the neighbor’s back yard, not a hundred feet away. The sky filled and exploded. Absolute and pure light. Sound bouldering through me. For a moment, my skin did not know itself and my eyes were blind white. My own electrical impulses darted, small and self-contained, neuron to neuron in the silence that followed.
This was not the optional foolishness of human or self-induced dangers. Lightning was the hand of God. Indifferent as time and far past the familiarities of love and guilt or the convolutions of tenderness. The hand of God pared down to the bone, stripped of religion’s flesh and, therefore, nearly unrecognizable, but animate. So animate. It was the loveliest thing I’d ever seen.
I was very young. I wanted it on the soft pads of my fingertips: contact, however tenuous or dangerous.
Separation can be a test of desire. In the absence of a loved one, desire or its lack will press upon us. At twenty, I found myself unable to shake an ex-lover. Though we stopped living together, he was everywhere I went in town. So I left town, going as far away as I could. To my relief, I found that I did not miss my old lover. In Berkeley, California, in 1976, there were beautiful, willing young men everywhere.
Socially, Berkeley was what I had expected: politics, cooperatives, communal living, sex, and drugs. But the unexpected small things caught me off-guard. Wet jeans draped over a chair would dry in one day. My hair hung straight down my back as if ironed. And there was a flower of such deep violet cobalt that it could stop me thinking of anything else. To a daughter of Southern humidity, these simple things were magical.
But after only a few months, I felt a vague unease. The hills rising up beyond Telegraph Avenue continued to seem artificial; I would not have been surprised to wake one morning and find that, like a stage set, they had been rearranged or taken down. And the trees in town were far too sparse and ornamental. Only the countryside and the wealthy neighborhoods offered loose, unbroken banks of green, and I was too poor for either.
More goading, though, was the placid sky. The year I spent there was a time of severe drought; it rained only once, a simple, brief shower. Often the sky was an even, ambiguous shade, neither white nor blue nor gray. At night, it hung low, an unnatural orange reflection of the streetlights. It was as if air and sky had abdicated. The ripeness of turning twenty-one was not easy under such cloudless silence. I began to wait as if I had heard that something was coming.
Eventually, I realized that I was longing for the warm rise of humidity and the opening of the sky, waiting for the elements’ jangle and dance. I was hesitant then to call my malady homesickness. Most people I met knew Florida only as a tropical beachy backdrop to the new Disney Land. I was already in the promised land of California; how could I long for her gauche Southern cousin?
I’ve spent time under the soft, relentless rain of Ireland and the fast cold clouds of the Netherlands. I’ve heard others grieve for the fall colors of Delaware, the freezing sleet of Utrecht, and the sleepless hum of New York City. But before I went to Berkeley, I was innocent of such grief; I did not know that a place can be desired as keenly and with as much lust as a lover. I returned to Florida humbled and grudgingly respectful of my home.
The best Florida sky dawns a clear open blue. Mid-morning dots it with small separate cumuli, each distinct and starkly white. By noon they gather into distant thunderheads. Heat and humidity build and the afternoon drags heavy as a tenth-month child. Dark and flat-bottomed, the clouds convolute up to shades of pure white that bend into blue-white caverns and billow out to blinding white again. Sometimes dozens fill the horizon, each edged in sunlight and shifting slow as mute, humped beasts set to pasture. By three or four o’clock, they gather into a blackness and lower themselves to press the moist air down on us. Everyone waits. Whether we are aware of it or not, we all wait—in line at the supermarket, driving our cars, or working. Our hair tightens in the dense air. Our pores open to sweat as soon as we step outside. Then the sky breaks. Released, rain splatters down fat. Light cracks the atmosphere and thunder drowns all other sound. The air cools. If we are lucky the phone or electric lines will go down, and we stop working, stop our writing and typing and talking on the phone. Stop for the carnival of coolness and light, letting the storm call us out of ourselves, interrupting and reshaping our day like a long bout of weeping or good sex. For the sunset there will be the smear of cirrus or the loosed cumulus to take the oranges and lavenders.
Some days, if there is time between the storm and the dusk, the sky may do its pretty trick, one that is best appreciated by looking around rather than up. At the end of a summer day when the sun is dropping but its light is still strong, the air will fill with golden light. The sky remains its ordinary pink self, but everything else glows as if outlines with a child’s lime-green crayon. Trees and shrubs radiate fresh yellow and blossoms shimmer orange The effect is strong enough to color dinner plates set on a table or a book held open at the window. It’s as if a rainbow has fallen to earth, and we are caught between the bands of yellow and green. We are pulled outside to our porches and decks, where we glow a deep reddish brown. This lasts only ten minutes or so, then vanishes into the coming darkness and we are ourselves again.
Weeks after returning to Florida I was in my apartment—my first in which I lived alone—when an afternoon storm came. The thunder and lightning were simultaneous, not a rumble but an explosion. No time for counting off the miles. There was only the sound of rain and then a large cracking overhead. I started for the door, but had no way to tell which tree was coming down or where it might fall. I stopped and was looking up at the ceiling when the limb fell. Through the screen door I could see the twisting black wire beneath it. Blue sparks danced up my doorstep and died in the rain.
Not long after this I was running in from the pumps at the gas station where I worked and the phone rang. Soaked by a quick rain, I answered it. It spat me across the room. My arm and jaw tingled and burned. My friend’s voice squeaked from the dangling receiver, “Are you there? Are you there?”
I was a good daughter, though; the next time I spoke to my mother I confessed that I had never believed what she said about telephone wires.
For a period afterward I dreamed of tornadoes and wind. Always, the funnel twisted in the distance, its dance erratic and obscene but bringing it closer all the same. There was no escape; to go in any direction might have brought me into its path. There was nothing left but to find the safest, deepest place and wait. Each time I was certain that, though my house might fly apart around me, I would survive. The nightmare was the waiting, the braced surrender and repulsion while watching the cone’s gyrations and listening to the creaking timbers of my house.
In my dreams, the tornado taught me that there are times to surrender rather than fight. There are things that can only be endured, that preclude all other options In my sleep I practiced for what I would later soon have to endure: grief and, later, childbirth.
In the months before my mother died of a sudden stroke, she gave me a new story. This one she did not tell complete, nor was it like her usual cautions and simple family anecdotes. I was in her kitchen, teasing, saying that she should get a young boyfriend to bolster her newly acquired status as a senior citizen. “I did once,” she said. “When?” I asked. And then, “For how long?” I expected to hear of a recent affair, some compensation for the distance that had grown between her and my father. Four years she had had a lover, two years on either side of my birth.
Months passed before she would tell more. She would give no name, but assured me that I was my father’s child. The affair began when she was comforting the man over the death of his child, a daughter. He was a trusted friend of the family, someone who could visit while my brother and sister were at school without anyone becoming suspicious. When I pressed her, asking how she could be certain of my paternity and my father’s ignorance, I only got her Mona Lisa smile and knew that I’d learn no more from her at the time.
My grief after her death overshadowed any curiosity. Those last pieces of her story were left where she’d dropped them.
I was pregnant with my first child when a woman I worked with told me this: “If you don’t live near the tracks and you wake up to the sound of a train, it’s a tornado.” She’d awakened that morning to find the slash pines in her yard shredded to topless columns. Her home was untouched. All she remembered was the sound of a train engine in the middle of the night. I could see on her fresh, broad face that she meant to assure me. The quickest, least predictable and deadliest of storms do, after all, warn us of their approach. All we have to do is teach ourselves to listen for trains where we know there are none.
My son was only ten months old when Elena pointed herself at my home. She was the first to come my way since Donna. For days she parked herself off the Gulf coast, keeping us in suspense. We waited. Even in the waiting I was anxious for my tiny child. Though stalled, Elena could shed tornadoes. All day the sky had the eerie gray-green that I associate with tornadoes. Outside, the trees bent one way and then another under the strong, fickle wind. The nursery had windows on two sides, wide expanses of glass that could buckle, splintering in and flying to find my child’s new flesh. Until Elena shifted and moved up the coast, I brought him into the bedroom to sleep with my husband and me. I put his playpen in the inside corner of the room and comforted myself with estimates of my house’s strength.
For the first time, I was truly afraid of a storm. Irreparable loss was now possible. The meteorologist’s recitation of the hurricane’s coordinates left me helpless.
Most things, if only for a moment, will eventually tip toward some extreme. I’d seen snow in Florida once or twice. But it was on an early June night that the lawn filled up with white. At thirty-four, I’d never seen hail larger than the letters on this page. From my study window, I could feel cold air rising from the ground. I dug through the back of my closet for a flannel shirt and went out on the ice. Large marbles of hail crunched and rolled under my feet. Circling my house, I marveled at the odd spring night of cold silence and wondered where all my neighbors were. Why did they not come out? All over town skylight windows were cracked, cars pockmarked, and screens torn.
I liked being caught off-guard by a sky that could throw ice into a Florida June night, and I wanted more surprises. My second child, a daughter, was learning to talk. Her simple recitation of birds and trees and body parts segued quickly into questions about where we come from, who we are, and where we are. Such questions and surprises engender a hunger, not as sharp as the hungers of adolescence, but a hunger all the same.
I began to research:
Outdoors at a party on a balmy early summer night, my neighbor and I talked about our families and growing up in central Florida. A tall man, lean and muscular, he tipped his glass up for a last swallow and told me that he used to have more brothers; one was killed. I envisioned a weapon, anger, a crime. But, no, he told me. They were children walking single-file, the oldest in front, trying to make it home before the storm hit. They walked, rather than running; there was no rain yet. But a single dry strike of lightning left one brother dead, one hurt, and the remaining two unharmed. I offered my condolences and eyed my neighbor for signs of lightning’s effect. He smiled and said it was long ago. Our next conversation, months later, was interrupted by thunder. He stood under a tree leaning on my chain link fence. Again and again the clouds exploded above us. We winced at the interruption, but neither of us left the fence to go inside. Finally, the blinding rain sent us scurrying to our homes.
In the almanacs and fact books I found the names of all the hurricanes this century. I learned that in the Lightning Belt which runs from Tampa Bay across Lake Okeechobee to the east coast, storms come, on the average, twice a week. Unlike hurricanes, these storms are nameless and seldom make the evening news. Still, they have power. Florida lightning packs a punch of up to 45,000 amps while the rest of the nation has to be happy with 25,000 amps of fewer. Consequently, more people are killed by lightning here than anywhere else in the United States. Most of them die in open fields, under trees, on the water, or at the golf course. Hillsborough County, Florida, from the time my family moved there, until 1985, the year my son learned to walk, had the highest rate of deaths caused by lightning.
From my relatives, I learned to listen for a story where none is being told. When my Great Aunt Lil died I returned to North Carolina for her funeral. Afterwards my aunts, my cousin Dorothy, and I gathered at the bedside of my younger aunt, Rachel, who was dying of cancer. I asked if any of them had a photograph of my grandfather, my mother’s father. “Oh, that preacher,” Rachel said. In the beats of silence that followed, she realized her mistake and I was given the identity of my mother’s lover. “No,” I told her. “Not my father, my grandfather.”
Pieces fell into place. Suddenly my mother’s relatives’ jokes and exaggerated awe at my growth each summer when we visited made sense. The minister had been a tall man. I recalled my mother’s stories about him: His youngest daughter died two years before I was born; he and his wife adored me, sometimes stealing me away from my playpen in the front yard and keeping me all day; once they hinted they would like to adopt me. From my stepmother, I learned that even my father knew of the affair. We are, none of us, a story told by one voice.
It has been years since I saw my mother’s blue-gray eyes. Some things remain. My daughter’s hair is the white-gold my mother had as a child, but, like mine, it curls in the humidity of approaching storms, drawing up against her temples and along her cheeks. My son has my mother’s blue-gray eyes.
Other things change. This year I discovered that I have grown—sometime in my thirties—an inch taller. Also, I am not so anxious for the sharp touch of lightning; that is contact I can wait for. Now thunder sounds to me like a good, deep chuckle. This is the joke’s punchline: there is no chosen or superior people, nor even a chosen species; we are not the glorious end of any spiritual or evolutionary process. Rain, wind, and electricity make no distinctions; when a hurricane takes down a town, it treats us and cockroaches with equal indifference. This is not a cruel or cold freedom, but one that frees us from the focused gaze on a single, omnipotent God. We are given the gift of ourselves not by a single all-seeing eye, but by the words and flesh of many others and by the places of the earth.
This has been said before, and every place has its own way of showing us our place. But the Florida peninsula, for all its storms, is easy in its insouciance. January’s warm air has no more intent toward us than does the lightning; all the same, we walk barefoot outside in the winter, and there’s a crop to be harvested most months of the year. Comfort is easy to find here, laughter easy to hear.
These days I go listen when it storms.
It is different now that my children are older. I have photographs of them dancing naked in the rain, but long ago they learned to seek shelter from lightning. Their bodies are growing, offering more surface area and experience to what the world may fling at them. My son can wear his father’s shoes, and he has weathered the surgeon’s knife. My daughter is too heavy to fit on my hip, and she has fallen thirty feet to the earth from the tip of an oak tree and then walked away.
My job now is not so much to protect them as to teach them to protect themselves. I can see that one day they will leave me.
For now though, they often join me on the front porch swing when I go outside to watch the storms and listen. They are learning to be quiet and listen, too. Still, when the lightning is sudden and close they jump then look to me before we all laugh.
This is what I want from them and for them: That they be able to listen to this place of sky and air and earth as though it were their mother telling an endless story. That they be ready to listen, always. For it is our nature to reply even if we are only laughing.
For myself, I want to become an old woman under these skies, to be caught at last by thunderheads, chuckling in a flat open field.
Copyright © Rhonda Riley. Originally published in Literal Latte, Vol. 7 No. 1, 2001, WordSCI, Inc., New York, NY.