Yibbet Turman here, reporting from Kansas City, Missouri, where something almost happened, but it turned out nothing did. The world is looking a lot like a Chopin nocturne, due to the fact that everything almost got destroyed, but it turned out nothing did. The trees are still looking solid and strong. Except that maybe they’re not. The clouds are just sitting up there now, scenery again, not the main event.
In a local coffee house, the owner and his kid and the patrons headed across the street to where they could get a basement, and sat it out with twenty old ladies wearing brightly colored pants.
In another local coffee house, a patron holed up in the bathroom with all the baristas and got to know them maybe more than she wanted to.
(What can I tell you? I’m highly connected to the world of coffee.)
In a local high school, a student objected to the defensive posture she was ordered to take, claiming that her back needed protection, but her behind did not. Students fiddled with their cell phones, begged to know how soon they could go to the bathroom, and teachers patted shoulders and sneaked away to watch the radar on a television hung above the treadmill, and made jokes amongst themselves that really weren’t appropriate.
In a local hospital, a day-old baby and a day-old mom were taken into the hallway, away from windows, and the mom planned to tell the baby the story, when she is old enough.
The people in Kansas City have just had the shit scared out of them because Joplin got it so rough. Joplin is a town we have heard of. The people who died weren’t just the unlucky in trailers and driving out alone. And their town, all the buildings we think of as being “real,” making the place the place, lots of them are just gone. We’re used to shrugging off tornado warnings. Right now it’s harder to resist imagining your house as a pile. What would it be like, folded down, and scattered?
Spring is not easy. To get to spring, here, we have to ride out the clashes of the clouds. After our blizzard and our record snowfall, we feel like we deserve an easy spring and we’re not getting it. Now joy is dangerous (it always was) and sun is not sunshiny, it’s the interruption of clouds so dramatic they look computer generated. This summer is having a difficult birth.
image “borrowed” from: http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Sesame_Street_News_Flash
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