I spent the weekend with my parents, and they in turn spent their money on my weekend. With them they brought warmth and violent weather, and I began to turn my head back toward the subtle activity and colors of the savage sky, that only a Kansan can read rightly this time of year. Even away from home, without the endless horizon, that treeless nothing.
As the storms barreled through, one night after the other, news came of Spring’s first continental treachery. I downloaded us a nicely-packaged newscast from the town I used to call home. The broadcaster cut to the footage of places I knew instantly. Uprooted trees in South Park, traffic lights from the intersections downtown blown clear from the crosswalks to the alleys. These places now covered in cruel piles of dangerous twig were radiating symbols of a living memory. On that sidewalk a kiss, and on that one we were vandals. My alma mater, atop the hill in disarray, classes cancelled. Big old trees laying cross the bus stop I stood by for half a decade. The highest flag tattered but still flying, present was the U but not the K. It was quite a sequence of moving pictures, barbed and rich.
Someone had scribbled all over the diary I’d never written. I got that tender old feeling, made me softer than my cotton shirt. I felt my face turn warm, there I was about to drop a wet tear in front of my own folks. Tried to grin and couldn’t, lips got sour as my shrinking face tried to turn behind itself. I’m sure they could see it.
Nobody was hurt, the town would recover. I knew that had I been around for the storm, I’d have called my folks saying that it was blown out of proportion, while also recounting the wicked splendor of it all. “Just a storm,” I’d say. But I wasn’t back home, I was in some hotel room in Missouri, just a couple miles from the place I strangely live.
And to the places and people I love, I’m sure it was just a storm. It’ll all look good again, someday soon. But I also know what sort of storm has and hasn’t hit that town. Eighty mile-an-hour winds the story reads, “that’s a Wichita sort of storm,” I tell my father. “Straight-line like the prairie.” Kansas is a windblown place, it’s good at recovering from the worst of the ugly breezes. Its few trees grow like cautious skeptics, craggily at an angle. It isn’t a hard beauty to restore. For us, it’s always just a storm.
But for me, that packet of long-distance-delivered local news had a different message. The spliced images of a former life had something bitter to tell me.That life you knew, it’s just a story. Those precious memories, easily destroyed, easily erased.I know, I nodded, hoping for a break. And all the streets with stories, along the windows shattered from the bars and halls where you spent hours and hours, these places, like you and like the winds, are easily replaced. A sad promise that I acknowledged and buried like a long-expected death, raw and real as it is in the moment.
After that it was easier to laugh with my parents in their hotel room like kids close in age. We got in a five-minute pillow fight. I walloped my mother a bit too hard and doused her with water. Then I drove to my apartment, on the east side of a red brick building, and just across the way from another and another. Storms come, but winds never.