The Wilson Post
LEBANON WEATHER

Cheryl Lewis: Preventing a tornado of loss seemed possible to 9-year-olds



CHERYL LEWIS

I didn’t die in a school shooting when I was 9.

I moved with my family to a new state and school when I was 9. Our new home had three bedrooms and there were eight of us sometimes. My stepfather wasn’t always around, since he had a problem with drinking a lot of alcohol; I suspect that’s why we’d moved in the first place. It can be tough to hold down a job when you aren’t reliable. At least that’s what I suppose now that I’m an adult and have experienced plenty.

When I was 9, mostly I just did my best to exist as far under the radar as I could crawl. That made the most sense to me in a family full of big personalities and a mom who knew how to wield a switch.

Spankings.

That’s the biggest fear I had when I was 9. Well, that and not being liked. These things shape how you feel about yourself when you’re not yet double digits. Is there someone who wants to play on the playground? When the girls circle up and are first discovering that talking about boys is silly fun, are you included or left shyly hovering on the fringe?

I had my first catastrophe when I was 9, since that’s the year I raced my favorite brother on our kid bikes down the hill in front of our home. It didn’t end well for me, unless you discover that the novelty of a cast on your left arm and wide gap in your teeth gives you sudden celebrity at school. I received an overstuffed packet of homemade notes drawn in class; I’ll always remember the cute frog drawing from Ellery Stephens that said, “Hop you get well.”

I wonder now about the teacher who had the kindness and forethought to create such an assignment. She was teaching empathy and concern for others; 50 years later, I’m still grateful.

She wasn’t shot at school that year and neither were any of my classmates. That wasn’t a thing yet.

In the backyard, my stepdad built a fort on stilts for me and my siblings. I realize now that such a project doesn’t happen in five minutes. I don’t even remember its construction; what still hangs with me is the memory of “club meetings” and the 50 cents that my brother and I charged our friends to attend. We were rich, though it’s easier now looking back to understand the true wealth that innocence amassed.

Sitting around the campfire that nobody old supervised, we were each kings and queens and storytellers. Ghost stories were the go-to crowd pleaser, where startling and frightening each other were most admired.

We thought we knew fear.

I still remember the names of my best friends, though the closest I’ve gotten to seeing them in person in decades has been their Facebook posts: Tammy Dooley. Sandi Corbett. Amy Hooper. Regina Skelton. Pam Doster. Lisa Chassevent.

My days were rich because of them. We experienced a lot together, but the most stressful alarms we had at school were tornado drills, where we were taught to sit on the hallway floor, knees hugged to our chests. We laughed, because the thought of debris flying over our heads while a storm raged around us seemed so unlikely.

That kind of chaos that upends your world happens only to other people, right?

It never occurred to us to wonder about those poor souls whose homes were actually uprooted by tumult and lives were forever changed by loss. The storms were an act of God, anyway. There was nothing we could do to prevent them.

If it was something that could be prevented, society and those who love mankind would do everything in their power to see that it happened, right? They’d cut the storm short before it fully formed. They’d move heaven and earth to protect us.

Right?

Cheryl Lewis lives in Watertown and has won top awards writing for newspapers in Alabama and Georgia. She can be reached at cheryl@almostfirewood.com.

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