[Critique Group 1] cleora's april submission

[sitting.duck at springmail.com]

Sorry this is late, folks. It has been a challenging month.
This is something I wrote and thought about sending a few months ago.

1910 words
Strange Rain
by Cleora Boyd

Creeped Out

I bagged the trash and headed out the door. All the slots under the car port of the two story apartment building across from the apartment I was living in during the mid-1980s, were in their places. One resident was turning down the North side of their building. Probably Headed for the laundry, I thought. It was too early for the office to be open, and most people were still asleep at this hour on a Saturday morning. 

Following the landing around, I skipped down the stairs and turned toward the dumpsters at the South end of the complex. It was a bright sunny spring morning. Around the fourth or fifth car on my side, I slowed. I had a disturbing feeling I was being followed. I looked behind me. The light was dim in the early morning dawn. There was no one there. Ahead of me, the sun was bright and shiny. Hum, I thought and walked on, but I couldn't shake the feeling. I looked behind me again. There was a slight breeze, and the air felt heavy and damp. Suddenly, I realized it was darker behind me than in front. I looked up. Spread over the access road between the two buildings, and just high enough to pass over was a dark grey cloud creeping along at the speed I was walking. I stopped and stared at it. Did it stop? It didn't seem to be moving. Or, was it? It wasn't raining behind me. Everything in front and behind me was dry. I looked up again. I definitely had a dark low hanging cloud on my tail. I decided to go ahead and take the trash to the dumpster as planned and quickened my pace. I glanced up from time to time. It was still there, keeping pace with me. At the dumpster, I tossed in the bag, and was then gripped with the realization I was going to have to somehow get around this ominous cloud and back to my apartment.

By now, the edge of the cloud was just above me. The carport for my building was a few feet away. Rain began to fall as I arrived under the cover of the first spot. I walked along under the port until I reached the slot next to the stairs up to my apartment. I watched the cloud migrate lazily along until I could go up the stairs without getting wet. Grinning and shaking my head, I wondered how I could have been so creeped out by a big, dark, low hanging, slow-moving cloud, and hurried to my computer to write down the experience.

Discriminating Rain

It was ten or fifteen years later. I had moved into a house by that time. It was an early summer day, and I had come home for lunch. I hit the garage door opener button and drove into my garage.

Inside, I went about the business of making my lunch. Then I noticed water running off my house. But, I thought, it's not raining. My first assumption was that some kids were playing a practical joke by using a hose to run water on my roof. I went to the patio window. Sheets of water were pouring off the roof and I could see drops from a heavy rain beating down on the patio. Perplexed, I went to the front door. The sun was shining brightly, and there was not a drop of water to be seen. At the patio window, a heavy rain continued to fall. Okay, I thought. What are the chances? The rain lasted for several minutes and only fell in the back yard. Not a single drop fell in the front. 

Angry Rain

On May 11, 1970, I was watching the Carol Burnett Show. They were singing “Raindrops Are Falling On My Head.” Outside, raindrops were falling, and the program was being frequently interrupted with reports of potentially dangerous storms in the area of Wolfforth--a town several miles to the Northwest of our location. My roommate and I were living in an apartment building with eight three room apartments. Four on the first floor and 4 on the second. Our apartment was on the first floor across from the manager. Our door was open. The heat that day had been oppressive. Driving home from school, it felt like the heat was bouncing off the asphalt. I had planned to visit my friend at Lubbock Christian College, but because the heat was so oppressive, I told Barbara, “Let's go home, We can visit her in the morning before she leaves.” Having grown up in the panhandle of Texas, I was quite used to thunderstorms. I kept telling my friend there was nothing to worry about. I didn't know why people always got so excited about a heavy rain. I remembered my folks standing at the back porch window when we had a storm. I realize now, they were watching the clouds for tornadic activity. When they were young, the technology we have today didn’t exist, and people knew how to “read the clouds” so they could take shelter if necessary. At that time, I had never seen or been in a tornado. Strangely enough, while I was preaching this sermon, I was going around the apartment storing everything I could either in the closet or in a drawer. Barbara watched me, mystified. 

Suddenly, the manager came to our door. “Come on,” he ordered. “We have to get into the basement.” 

Everyone in the building was rounded up and we were ushered down the stairs into the cellar. As soon as the musty smell of dirt reached my nostrils, I wanted to turn around and run back out, but my way was blocked by the other residents. As the tornado passed over, I felt dirt falling on my head. It sounded like the building was being lifted up. Eventually everything settled down as the danger passed. As it happens, we were at the outer edge of the storm. 

We came out and surveyed the damage. The man in the apartment on the top Southeast corner had moved his truck up beside the building to protect it. This was the only corner of the building that was damaged, and the wind had dropped the debris on his vehicle after depositing a tree trunk in their tub. For this reason, I refuse to take shelter in a tub during a storm. This man, we learned from his wife, had left as soon as we came out of the basement to go looting. In our apartment, the glass in the windows in our living room was blown completely out, but, the curtains, were hanging as if nothing had happened. My research paper that was due on Monday, was soaked. Not sure why it hadn't been one of the things I put in a drawer. The red pot with my Jacobs plant was still sitting on the window sill, well-watered, and undisturbed. None of the leaves were so much as nicked, and There weren't any pieces of glass or anything in the pot. The apartment building to the north looked like a building under construction. The roof was gone, there was no glass in any of the windows, and no furniture was visible in any of the rooms. To the north of that building, the house had collapsed into the basement killing all inside. In contrast to the earlier intense heat, it was uncomfortably cold, and a heavy fish smell hung in the air.

A brick had gone through the back window of Barbara's car. The glass was completely gone, but nothing else was damaged. There was no piece of glass or brick that was larger than the tip of my little finger.

The Citizen Bank Tower was visibly twisted. I don't know to what angle, but it was like a giant hand had reached down and turned it clockwise. If you stood at a distance, you could watch it sway back and forth. The news speculated that there may have been as many as 300 tornadoes in the area that night.

For years, When a storm came up I would go to a friend's house that had a bomb shelter until the storm passed. I stopped doing that after one night when I was on my way, I had to drive through flooded streets. I could feel the water coming into my car and soaking my feet in the floorboard. As I was driving down 19th Street, I heard a roar over my head that might have been a tornado passing over. The next day, the news reported that there had been a movement in the cloud at about where I was at that time. After that, I decided I was safer staying where ever I was. Now, that I no longer drive, I have no other choice. After I moved to Fort Worth, I would relive that experience every time I drove under a railroad track with a train passing overhead. It sounds much the same as what I heard in the basement that night. The PTSD from this experience lasted close to 50 years. I didn't even realize that was what it was until all the discussion of soldier’s returning from war torn areas. I can definitely understand the affect a terrifying experience can have on one's life.

Slanted Rain 

When I was young, we lived on a little acreage out in the country off Highway 214. One evening in the late '50s or early '60s, I was standing on the front porch looking to the east. There, one or so miles away, was a small dark cloud with what looked like dark yarn streaming down to the ground at roughly a five degree angle. It took a while for me to realize I was watching it rain in the distance. The cloud was either moving very slowly, or there was a light breeze blowing under the cloud just enough to cause the rain to fall at an angle. 

Pulling Trees

One evening in 2000, a thunder storm came through my neighborhood. That is not unusual in an area referred to as tornado alley. Having been in a tornado, I was nervous. I opened my front door to look out. The Arizona Elm with a 45 foot canopy was twisting and bunched together at the top like a huge hand had grasped it and was trying to pull it up.

It is easy to think that whatever is happening weatherwise where we are is also happening everywhere else around us, but that is not the case. I’m not sure I would have realized that if it hadn’t been for the experience of the cloud between the apartment buildings or the one over my house. In Fort Worth, it is not unusual to drive through torrential rain for a mile or two and then ride for a while in bright sunshine before driving through another distance of heavy rain. In the case of the cloud over my house, maybe it started to drop its rain as it moved past the middle of my roof, and then continued south, never dropping any rain on the front; similar to the cloud that was moving between the apartment buildings. What is interesting to me, is that all of these clouds, if moving, were either moving North or South, not East or West.