[Critique Group 1] Fwd: Leonard's comments on Cleora's work

Thu Apr 29 10:56:23 EDT 2021

Sorry, I sent this to group 2 the first try.

-----Original Message-----
From: tuchyner5 at aol.com
To: group2 at bluegrasspals.com <group2 at bluegrasspals.com>
Sent: Thu, Apr 29, 2021 10:49 am
Subject: Leonard's comments on Cleora's work

Very interesting weather experiences. 

Each one was quite distinctive.  

It was well written and full ofintgerestingdetails and facts.  

There were a few typos and one sentence I wouldredo. 

But all in all this was a fine rendition.

Cleora sub for April

Creeped Out

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

Following the landing around, I skipped down thestairs and turned toward the dumpsters at the South end of the complex. It wasa bright sunny spring morning. Around the fourth or fifth car on my side, Islowed. I had a disturbing feeling I was being followed. I looked behind me. Thelight 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'tshake the feeling. I looked behind me again. There was a slight breeze, and theair felt heavy and damp. Suddenly, I realized it was darker behind me than infront. I looked up. Spread over the access road between the two buildings, andjust high enough to pass over was a dark grey cloud creeping along at the speedI was walking. I stopped and stared at it. Did it stop? It didn't seem to bemoving. Or, was it? It wasn't raining behind me. Everything in front and behindme was dry. I looked up again. I definitely had a dark low hanging cloud on mytail. I decided to go ahead and take the trash to the dumpster as planned andquickened my pace. I glanced up from time to time. It was still there, keepingpace with me. At the dumpster, I tossed in the bag, and was then gripped withthe realization I was going to have to somehow get around this ominous cloud andback 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 Iarrived under the cover of the first spot. I walked along under the port untilI reached the slot next to the stairs up to my apartment. I watched the cloudmigrate 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 outby a big, dark, low hanging, slow-moving cloud, and hurried to my computer towrite down the experience.

Discriminating Rain

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

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

Angry Rain

On May 11, 1970, I was watching the CarolBurnett Show. They were singing “Raindrops Are Falling On My Head.” Outside,raindrops were falling, and the program was being frequently interrupted withreports of potentially dangerous storms in the area of Wolfforth--a townseveral miles to the Northwest of our location. My roommate and I were livingin an apartment building with eight three room apartments. Four on the firstfloor and 4 on the second. Our apartment was on the first floor across from themanager. Our door was open. The heat that day had been oppressive. Driving homefrom school, it felt like the heat was bouncing off the asphalt. I had plannedto visit my friend at Lubbock Christian College, but because the heat was sooppressive, I told Barbara, “Let's go home, We can visit her in the morningbefore she leaves.” Having grown up in the panhandle of Texas, I was quite usedto thunderstorms. I kept telling my friend there was nothing to worry about. Ididn't know why people always got so excited about a heavy rain. I rememberedmy 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, thetechnology 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 beenin a tornado. Strangely enough, while I was preaching this sermon, I was goingaround the apartment 

storing everything I could either in the closet or in a drawer. Barbarawatched me, mystified.

What sermon were you preaching.

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

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

We came out and surveyed the damage. The man inthe apartment on the top Southeast corner had moved his truck up beside thebuilding to protect it. This was the only corner of the building that wasdamaged, and the wind had dropped the debris on his vehicle after depositing atree trunk in their tub. For this reason, I refuse to take shelter in a tubduring a storm. This man, we learned from his wife, had left as soon as we cameout of the basement to go looting.

It sounds like you went looting rather than theman who owned the vehicle.

 In ourapartment, the glass in the windows in our living room was blown completelyout, but, the curtains, were hanging as if nothing had happened. My researchpaper that was due on Monday, was soaked. Not sure why it hadn't been one ofthe things I put in a drawer. The red pot with my Jacobs plant was stillsitting on the window sill, well-watered, and undisturbed. None of the leaveswere so much as nicked, and There weren't any pieces of glass or anything inthe pot. The apartment building to the north looked like a building underconstruction. The roof was gone, there was no glass in any of the windows, andno 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 tothe earlier intense heat, it was uncomfortably cold, and a heavy fish smellhung in the air.

A brick had gone through the back window of Barbara'scar. The glass was completely gone, but nothing else was damaged. There was nopiece of glass or brick that was larger than the tip of my little finger.

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

For years, When a storm came up I would go to afriend's house that had a bomb shelter until the storm passed. I stopped doingthat after one night when I was on my way, I had to drive through floodedstreets. I could feel the water coming into my car and soaking my feet in thefloorboard. As I was driving down 19th Street, I heard a roar over my head thatmight have been a tornado passing over. The next day, the news reported thatthere had been a movement in the cloud at about where I was at that time. Afterthat, I decided I was safer staying where ever I was. Now, that I no longerdrive, I have no other choice. After I moved to Fort Worth, I would relive thatexperience every time I drove under a railroad track with a train passingoverhead. 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 realizethat was what it was until all the discussion of soldier’s returning from wartorn areas. I can definitely understand the affect a terrifying experience canhave on one's life.

Slanted Rain

When I was young, we lived on a little acreageout 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 milesaway, was a small dark cloud with what looked like dark yarn streaming down tothe ground at roughly a five degree angle. It took a while for me to realize Iwas 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 therain to fall at an angle.

Pulling Trees

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

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

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