Note: This is a piece about some of my memories. If you're reading this on a device connected to the Internet, you can listen to the songs that have attached themselves to these memories in my mind.
Please start with the song from which I plucked this title, These Dreams, by Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart. This version, performed live.
Come along with me and let me tell you some stories.
The sky turned green that night in 1986 at 8 o'clock. I saw it over the trees while I snatched the dried sheets off the clothes line, putting the wooden pins in my overall pockets. Quickly, but carefully; you didn't "lose" items in our house.
A few minutes earlier the dissonant emergency warning tone interrupted the Brady Bunch on the television set. I didn't need to read the scrolling warning; you could feel what was happening. Hot, wet air. The birds weren't moving. No leaves quivered in the breeze because there wasn't one.
It was wrong.
I rushed outside to get the laundry—if it got wet again I'd have to answer for it.
The wind nearly ripped the screen door out of my hand as I tried to push through the back door into the kitchen. The light outside through the picture window in the foyer dimmed, then it brightened again.
I ran. Up the stairs to my sister Jesse's room to pull her by the hand. My brother Curt was in bed at the small room at the other end of the tall, narrow hall.
"Come on, get up. Now. No time," I said as I tried to shake him awake. No time. I picked him up and carried him down the stairs while I dragged my sister behind me.
CRACK! Lightning struck so close I heard the sound of the whip at the same time the flash blinded me through the window on the stair landing.
We have to move.
The pressure changed, the wind switched directions. The windows breathed in, then out, in, then out against their frames. I lost my nerve there on the floor of the foyer, holding my brother and sister against me as I pulled the phone receiver on the long yellow cord from the kitchen over to our spot.
"Grandma I'm scared," I said, crying. She soothed me and talked to me. I don't remember what she said before the line went dead.
And then, the deluge.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Disaffected Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.