Daughter's Birthday

Lest I forget, in the midst of all the recent storm activity........today is my oldest child's 27th birthday!! Here she is at 14 months:

It seems like only yesterday, of course, when she brightened our lives as our first baby!

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I do have a stormy weather memory that involves her. When she was about three weeks old, a bad windstorm went through our area.......not a tornado, but a very strong straight-line wind. It was in the late afternoon; I was feeding my daughter and watching the news, which included a severe thunderstorm warning. The storm line on the radar map appeared ominously close to home, so I ran to the north window to look out and saw the most awful-looking bunch of black clouds rolling along the ground toward our house (we were renting a place near here).

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I quickly put my daughter in an infant seat and grabbed a blanket and we ran to the north room of the basement. I can remember hearing the wind roaring overhead, and for once in my life I was truly afraid in a storm. There was added worry, too, because I wasn't sure exactly where Husband was.......I had driven him to a field we were renting a couple miles away shortly before the storm blew up. There were no cell phones back then, so people couldn't be in touch with each other constantly.

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It turned out he had taken the tractor back to his folk's farm and was trying to drive home in the car. As the strong line of wind roared through, he was sitting on the road by the cemetery, the car rocking back and forth. He saw a pine tree snap off and go flying over the tombstones and he truly thought he and the car would be next!

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When my baby daughter and I emerged from the basement, the first thing I saw was our large walnut tree leaning over against the machine shed. There were many other big branches down all over the lawn, and trees fallen over the road. It was a good thing Husband didn't keep driving; a tree or power lines could have fallen on him in the car.

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As I said, that was the only time in my life that I was truly frightened during a windstorm. Possibly, though, having another little person to be responsible for also heightened my anxiety, one of the side effects of becoming a parent!!