Phenomenon…

Tornadoes are particularly mystifying in the way things are not destroyed during the storm, but strangely swirled out of their original location and gently deposited elsewhere.

One of my college roommates was from Zion, Illinois, a city that was visited by a tornado in the early 1980s, if I remember right. Jill told me that when she and her family emerged from the basement to survey the damage after the tornado passed through, they walked outside to find a ladder leaning upright against their garage – a ladder that didn’t belong to them. On the third rung of the ladder sat a pitcher of orange juice, almost as though somebody had left it there to consume later.

Stories like that are starting to come out of Hallam, too. One lady was picking through the rubble of what used to be her kitchen and found three unbroken eggs lying on the floor. Her refrigerator door was in the backyard, but the fridge itself was nowhere to be found. Odd that a tornado strong enough to crumple railroad cars and snap the trunks of tall oak trees would have been able to swipe three eggs out of their container and set them carefully on the floor, then smash the rest of the house around them without leaving so much as a hairline crack.

There’s a metaphor to this, but I can’t quite work it out in my head this morning.

--Sparki