We were in West Liberty once, visiting a gracious old lady in a double-wide. I recognized downtown on CNN, remembered a left turn into the countryside.
When you live somewhere for a few years, it is always part of you, an alternate universe.
My wife was driving along the Ohio one day, with our three children in the car. She had lived in Texas as a kid, and recognized a funnel cloud when she saw one.
Get into the lowest ditch, the radio said, so she did, but the twister veered away.
It’s coming to get us, she said after that. It’s coming right up Brownsboro Road.
I covered a tornado in Green County that spring. A little boy, sleeping in his farmhouse, had been impaled in a splintered tree. By the time I got there, the sun was out, a beautiful spring day in Kentucky.
Eighteen months after we moved back home, the same system that crushed Xenia, Ohio, blew straight up Brownsboro Road, demolishing the town houses on the corner, ripping the roof off our kids’ old school.
This Friday night we held our breath for Henryville and West Liberty and all the rest from where we used to live.
* * *
Below: The view from the Courier-Journal Building.
When you live somewhere for a few years, it is always part of you, an alternate universe.
My wife was driving along the Ohio one day, with our three children in the car. She had lived in Texas as a kid, and recognized a funnel cloud when she saw one.
Get into the lowest ditch, the radio said, so she did, but the twister veered away.
It’s coming to get us, she said after that. It’s coming right up Brownsboro Road.
I covered a tornado in Green County that spring. A little boy, sleeping in his farmhouse, had been impaled in a splintered tree. By the time I got there, the sun was out, a beautiful spring day in Kentucky.
Eighteen months after we moved back home, the same system that crushed Xenia, Ohio, blew straight up Brownsboro Road, demolishing the town houses on the corner, ripping the roof off our kids’ old school.
This Friday night we held our breath for Henryville and West Liberty and all the rest from where we used to live.
* * *
Below: The view from the Courier-Journal Building.
